"Organizing the Human Rights Function within a Company: A Good Practice Noted endorsed by the United Nations Global Compact Human Rights and Labour Working Group on 15 May 2014", 15 May 2014

One of the early questions a company must answer in meeting its corporate responsibility to respect human rights is deciding how it will organize the human rights function internally to effectively drive the process of embedding respect for human (including labor) rights...There is no single ‘right’ answer to how to organize the human rights function internally. The most effective approaches will take full account of an individual company’s particular context, including the most immediate challenges it faces in meeting its responsibility to respect human rights, where leadership and influence lie within the company, and how signals get sent internally (and externally) about the seriousness of corporate commitments, in order to determine how shared responsibility can best be generated. This Good Practice Note surveys a number of company experiences in organizing the human rights function internally; based on those experiences, it draws out some ‘emerging good practice guidance’ for companies, highlighting a series of questions that may help inform corporate decision-making on how best to organize the human rights function...