“Effective company-level grievance mechanisms: multi-stakeholder perspectives and examples from practice. Report on the panel session organized by ACCESS Facility in cooperation with UN Global Compact.  Monday, 16 November 2015”, 28 Jan 2016

The UN Guiding Principles on Business and Human Rights (UNGPs) address the need for rights and obligations to be matched to appropriate effective judicial and non-judicial remedies when breached.  While judicial mechanisms should be at the core of ensuring access to remedy, non-judicial mechanisms have an essential role to play in complementing and supplementing these judicial mechanisms.  The UNGPs support the notion that non-judicial mechanisms at the company-level can identify, address, and remediate individual and community grievances at an early stage.  However, the UNGPs also stress that poorly designed or implemented grievance mechanisms can risk compounding a sense of grievance amongst affected stakeholders by heightening their sense of disempowerment and disrespect by the process…[T]his panel set out to address a number questions, such as: how should companies and users design mechanisms that provide effective remedy for those whose human rights have been adversely affected?  What are the most important success factors or challenges for an effective company-level grievance mechanism?  A recurring theme was incentives for business to set up effective company-level grievance mechanisms…A key element that was met with consensus was the importance of involving the users of a mechanism in its design…