BSR Insight | Moving Beyond Traditional Notions of Human Rights in the ICT Sector
Last week, BSR facilitated a workshop with sustainability, procurement, and legal representatives from nine information and communications technology (ICT) companies—Alcatel-Lucent, Belgacom, BT, Deutsche Telekom, Nokia, SAP, ST Microelectronics, Telefonica, and Telia Sonera—on implementing the UN Guiding Principles on Human Rights. Participants discussed how to conduct a human rights impact assessment, develop and integrate a human rights policy, and measure progress.
During a conversation about moving beyond traditional human rights areas such as supply chain and labor, one attendee noted that ICT companies need to think both about how they can provide solutions to support human rights and also how to minimize negative impacts on human rights that might be created by their “solutions”:
“ICT solutions support the development of human rights—access to education, for instance—which cannot be perceived as a way to compensate risks. We need to work on both fronts at the same time: to max out opportunities [that support human rights and address] … the risks that our solutions are likely to generate.”
—Workshop participant (October 12, 2011)
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