Briefs

Innovative Pathways: When and how to use alternative approaches to Human Rights Impact Assessments

Human rights violations are widespread across global supply chains, with companies increasingly exposed to risks like forced labor and environmental degradation. While audits and certifications have proven insufficient in preventing such abuses, a more robust approach is necessary. A Human Rights Impact Assessment (HRIA) is an essential tool that helps businesses identify and assess human rights risks by engaging directly with affected rightsholders. This process is becoming more critical, especially with new regulations like the EU's Corporate Sustainability Due Diligence Directive, which mandates comprehensive human rights and environmental due diligence (HREDD) for large companies starting in 2027.

To make the HRIA process more efficient, some companies are exploring alternatives like joint HRIAs, sector-wide impact assessments, and rapid assessments. Joint HRIAs allow companies to share resources and expertise, especially when they source from the same suppliers or regions, while sector-wide assessments provide a broader view of industry-wide impacts. Rapid assessments are a faster alternative, focused on urgent or well-documented issues.

Regardless of the approach, companies must adhere to key criteria to ensure effectiveness: selecting appropriate targets, engaging rightsholders meaningfully, addressing root causes, ensuring transparency, and committing to action. These principles ensure that the assessment process is thorough and leads to real, lasting improvements in human rights practices. Cutting corners in the due diligence process is not an option.

Takers, Not Makers

The unjust poverty and unearned wealth of colonialism

Fair Taxes, Stronger Futures

Making corporations and the ultrarich pay their fair share for a more equal society

Guaranteed Income: Securing the Right to an Adequate Standard of Living

A guaranteed income can dramatically reduce poverty and inequality, advance gender and racial justice, and support workers. By providing direct cash assistance without onerous conditions or eligibility requirements, it can help create a more equitable future.

Oxfam America recognizes the human right to an adequate standard of living. To fulfill this right and address inequality, policymakers should support local guaranteed income initiatives and work toward a federal income guarantee. By providing unconditional cash transfers, a guaranteed income would represent a sharp break from the punitive, highly conditional, and inadequate safety net programs that allow poverty and extreme inequality to persist. It can break down the structural barriers that perpetuate racial and gender disparities and help create a more just economy.

Federal Jobs Guarantee: Fulfilling the Human Right to Dignified Work

By providing decent work to all who seek it, a federal jobs guarantee could reduce poverty and inequality, advance gender and racial justice, protect workers’ rights, and provide critically needed social services.

Oxfam America recognizes the fundamental human right to dignified work and the critical role of the public sector in helping achieve that right. To that end, a federal jobs guarantee can help fulfill workers’ rights, strengthen the economy, and reduce racial and gender inequalities.

Baby Bonds: Reducing Economic, Racial, and Gender Inequality

By providing vital resources to all children when they reach adulthood, baby bonds can reduce inequality, promote economic security, and help close race and gender wealth gaps.

Oxfam America recognizes the human right to an adequate standard of living and calls on policymakers to support proposals for baby bonds, which can ensure that all young adults have the resources they need to be economically secure. Alongside measures that tax the rich, redistribute economic power, and invest in public services, baby bonds can alleviate the effects of policies that exacerbate inequality and deny marginalized communities the opportunity to build wealth.