Human Rights Due Diligence

Despite their commitments and obligations, development finance institutions are often failing to identify, assess, and mitigate the human rights impacts that their activities can cause or exacerbate. Because of this, development projects are often fueling human rights abuses (from forced displacement to land grabs, discrimination, or reprisals) and failing to contribute to their sustainable development objectives. This is why, for a human rights-based approach to development, it is crucial to ensure development finance institutions conduct meaningful human rights due diligence.

What is human rights due diligence?

Human rights due diligence (HRDD) describes an ongoing process or set of measures necessary to identify, mitigate, and address adverse human rights risks and impacts. In the context of development finance, development banks – as well as their public and private sector clients – have due diligence obligations, to ensure that the activities they support do not cause, contribute to or exacerbate adverse human rights impacts.

This involves:

• identifying human rights risks and impacts directly or indirectly connected with the DFI’s activities
• preventing human rights abuses
• mitigating adverse human rights impacts, and maximizing positive human rights impacts where possible;
• accounting for how human rights are impacted and impacts are addressed, and remedying any adverse impacts.

Meaningful human rights due diligence should also take into account reprisal risks (see more in the recommendations included in our report Wearing Blinders).

The HRDD project

In 2017, the Coalition for Human Rights in Development launched the Human Rights Due Diligence Project (HRDD Project) to advance human rights in development, by making sure that governments and development finance institutions adequately assess and address the human rights risks and opportunities often associated with development activities. You can read more about the project here. 

The project included:

• the HRDD protocol (download the protocol flowchart here)
• the Human Rights Risk Analysis (HuRRA) tool and standards (interactive version not available any more, but the content is available here)
• a survey of existing practice on human rights impact assessment and human rights due diligence (outdated, spreadsheet with the 2018 data available here), as well as a summary of some good practices.

The HRDD protocol

The HRDD protocol, developed by the Coalition for human rights in development, has the following characteristics:

• Uses a normative human rights framework against which to measure impacts, which is comprehensive in scope and analyzes contextual risk factors.
• Assesses and characterizes project risk by severity of impacts on people, not by cost of investment or probability.
• Addresses risks using a mitigation hierarchy to prevent human rights abuses and avoid adverse impacts, focusing on restitution rather than compensation.
• Employs active due diligence on the part of the bank and borrower, calibrated to significance of social risk.
• Ensures transparent and participatory processes, including community confirmation of impact assessments, with active monitoring.
• Ensures positive development and poverty reduction impact.
• Integrates processes of community engagement, risk analysis, impact assessment, project design, monitoring, supervision, and allocation of resources to ensure that each is informed by and feeding back into the other.

Click here to find out how a human rights-informed risk and impact analysis differs from standard social and environmental assessment.

The HURRA Tool and Standards

This is a guide for development banks and governments planning and implementing development activities that can help identify and evaluate human rights-related risks and opportunities associated with a given development proposal, and to design rights-respecting development interventions. 

FAQ on the Hurra tool.