Report assesses human rights performance of 22 largest Irish companies based on CHRB Core Indicators
On November 8th, the Centre for Social Innovation (CSI) at the Trinity Business School launched a report assessing the human rights performance of the 22 largest companies in Ireland based on the Corporate Human Rights Benchmark (CHRB) methodology. Just five companies had a total score of greater than 20%, the highest score being 42%, with a further seven scoring between 10-20%, and ten companies less than 10%.
Key findings suggest amongst others that:
There is a lack of awareness among Irish companies of the UN Guiding Principles on Business & Human Rights and/or a lack of explicit compliance with these as evidenced by the low scores in the CHRB index;
There is a particular weakness in the area of ‘embedding respect and human rights due diligence’ in their policies and public declarations – although companies are weak in all areas examined
The report concludes that Ireland needs to move beyond a ‘soft law’ approach to truly incentivise companies to embed respect for human rights into their policies and practices. The full report is available below.