The UN Guiding Principles on Business & Human Rights

The UN Guiding Principles on Business & Human Rights

The UN Guiding Principles on Business and Human Rights (UNGPs), unanimously endorsed by the UN Human Rights Council on 16 June 2011, represent the most authoritative global framework defining the respective roles of states and companies in addressing business-related human rights harms. They are not a treaty and are therefore not legally binding in international law. Yet they have become the reference point for national legislation, investor expectations, corporate reporting standards, and litigation across the world.

John Ruggie and the Ruggie Framework

The UNGPs were developed by Professor John Ruggie, the Harvard academic appointed as UN Special Representative of the Secretary-General on Business and Human Rights from 2005 to 2011. Ruggie was tasked with this role after a previous UN attempt, the "Norms on the Responsibilities of Transnational Corporations" (2003), failed to achieve consensus, partly because it attempted to place direct legal obligations on companies equivalent to those of states.

Ruggie took a different approach. Rather than creating new binding obligations, he mapped the existing obligations of states and the expectations on business under existing standards, then structured these into a coherent framework. After extensive consultation across 47 countries with governments, companies, civil society, and affected communities, he presented the "Protect, Respect and Remedy" framework in 2008, followed by the operationalising Guiding Principles in 2011. The UNGPs contain 31 principles organised under three pillars.

The Three Pillars

Pillar I: The State Duty to Protect

Principles 1-10 address the duty of states to protect individuals from human rights abuses by third parties, including business enterprises. This includes enacting laws that require companies to respect human rights, providing access to effective remedy when abuses occur, and ensuring that state-owned enterprises and businesses receiving state support (export credits, procurement) exercise due diligence. States also have obligations in areas such as export credit, development finance, and conflict-affected areas to ensure their policies are coherent with human rights.

Pillar II: The Corporate Responsibility to Respect

Principles 11-24 define the independent responsibility of business enterprises to respect human rights. This responsibility exists regardless of whether the state has fulfilled its own duties. Key principles include:

• Principle 11: Business enterprises should respect human rights, which means they should avoid infringing on the human rights of others and should address adverse human rights impacts with which they are involved.
• Principle 13: The responsibility to respect requires that enterprises avoid causing or contributing to adverse impacts, and that they seek to prevent or mitigate impacts directly linked to their operations, products, or services through business relationships even if they have not contributed to those impacts.
• Principle 15: To meet their responsibility to respect, business enterprises should have in place: a policy commitment; a human rights due diligence process; and processes to enable the remediation of adverse impacts they cause or contribute to.
• Principle 17: Human rights due diligence should include assessing actual and potential human rights impacts, integrating and acting on findings, tracking responses, and communicating how impacts are being addressed.

Pillar III: Access to Remedy

Principles 25-31 address the need for victims of business-related human rights abuses to have access to effective remedy. This encompasses both judicial mechanisms (courts) and non-judicial mechanisms, including state-based non-judicial mechanisms (such as national human rights institutions and OECD National Contact Points) and non-state-based mechanisms (such as operational-level grievance mechanisms run by companies themselves). Principle 31 sets out eight effectiveness criteria that all non-judicial mechanisms should meet: they should be legitimate, accessible, predictable, equitable, transparent, rights-compatible, a source of continuous learning, and (for operational mechanisms) based on engagement and dialogue.

Scope: Which Enterprises Are Covered?

The UNGPs apply to all business enterprises, regardless of their size, sector, location, ownership, or structure. However, Principle 14 acknowledges that the severity of adverse impacts and the scale of risk management expected of smaller enterprises will differ from larger ones. The way the responsibility manifests will depend on the nature of operations, the context of operation, and the severity of potential impacts.

Impact and Influence Since 2011

The UNGPs have become the dominant reference point in business and human rights. They underpinned the development of:

• The OECD Guidelines for Multinational Enterprises (revised 2011 and 2023 to align with UNGPs)
• The ILO MNE Declaration (revised 2022 to reference HRDD)
• The EU Corporate Sustainability Due Diligence Directive (CSDDD, 2024)
• The French Duty of Vigilance Law (2017) and German Supply Chain Act (2023)
• Investor frameworks including the UN-supported Principles for Responsible Investment (PRI)
• The UNGP Reporting Framework, used by companies to structure human rights disclosures

The Corporate Human Rights Benchmark (CHRB), run by the World Benchmarking Alliance, assesses approximately 100 major companies across high-risk sectors against indicators directly aligned to the UNGPs. In the 2026 iteration, the average score across 105 companies was 53.7 out of 100, with significant variation by sector: extractives companies scored an average of 64%, while motor vehicle manufacturers scored only 44%.