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Business and human rights: Your role in Neom

Neom should be seen as an overambitious vanity project that presents both human rights and environmental challenges. A number of senior staff working on Neom have resigned over unrealistic specifications and the absence of the expertise and transparency required to bring the project to life. If a business does wish to participate in Neom, however, it has significant potential leverage to call out human rights abuses, as completion of the project will not be possible without foreign investment and support.

As well as avoiding actual complicity in human rights abuses, businesses have a responsibility, laid down in the UN Guiding Principles on Business and Human Rights (UNGPs), to prevent any adverse human rights impacts linked to their operations through their business relationships. This includes respecting the rights of indigenous peoples, ethnic minorities and migrant workers, all of which are being violated by the Neom project. The UNGPs further emphasise businesses’ responsibility to address adverse impacts where they occur by taking “adequate measures for their prevention, mitigation and, where appropriate, remediation”.

In light of the human rights abuses already being committed in the preliminary phases of Neom’s construction, as well as the adverse environmental impacts that its full realisation would entail, investors and contractors involved in the project are urged to use all leverage at their disposal to call for the cessation of human rights abuses related to Neom, and specifically to call for the release of members of the Huwaitat tribe who have been wrongfully imprisoned.