Community voice in human rights impact assessments
Human rights impact assessments (HRIAs) are intended to minimize human rights risks, lessen adverse impacts, and strengthen positive outcomes of business investments on affected populations. For an HRIA to fulfill this purpose, it must consider the perspectives of everyone affected by a company’s operations, project, products, or services. But all too often, companies ignore this critical input, instead opting for top-down tools that fail to capture communities’ assertions. In doing so, they forfeit the opportunity to minimize human rights violations and costly conflicts.