Foundations of Investor Respect for Rights
On behalf of my colleagues at Shift, welcome to the Foundations for Investor Respect for Rights resource! We are grateful for your interest in how investors can work with the companies in their portfolios to play their important role in ensuring business gets done with respect for people’s rights and dignity.
Today many businesses operate or have business partnerships across geographic and political borders. While protecting the rights of people is a role of governments, sometimes these protections can be weak or non-existent, or enforcement and application is uneven to different groups of people within a country. As such, many organizations now know that minimum legal compliance is often not enough to meet the expectations of their stakeholders and mitigate the risk of being involved with impacts on people through their operations and value chains. Businesses in the portfolio can experience negative impacts themselves when human rights are compromised, through a loss of social license to operate, reputational and brand impacts, difficulties in attracting and retaining the desired caliber of staff, extended project timelines, and fueling inequality, among others.
Investors have the ability to influence the companies in their portfolios to identify and manage their risks to people more effectively. Since the endorsement of the UN Guiding Principles on Business and Human Rights by the UN Human Rights Council in 2011, investors have been an essential force in motivating companies to expand their traditional risk management approach to include a lens of risks to people. At Shift, we know from our work with real economy companies that investor influence isn’t a formula that only corresponds to majority equity stakes or seats on Boards; even modest investors in a wide variety of asset classes command the attention of companies who have enduring financing needs and want to understand the priorities of capital markets participants. Investors can, and do, make a real difference.
Our intention is that this resource will be a first step in your making a difference as an investor – and meeting your responsibilities to respect rights. Our objective is to introduce you to human rights due diligence in the specific context of an investor, offer you a curation of resources that we think will be helpful to you in developing that due diligence capacity, and pose some leading questions to prompt you to consider what you’ll need to do to bring attention to human rights to life at your organization.
In a complicated world and a busy time for us all, we especially appreciate that you are making human rights a priority. We hope that this resource is useful to you.
Caroline Rees
President and Co-Founder
Shift
