Our salient human rights issues
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Identifying our salient human rights issues has helped us prioritise how we address human rights impacts across our operations and value chain. Saliency helps us to focus our efforts and is defined by the UN Guiding Principles on Business and Human Rights (UNGPs) as 'the human rights that are at risk of the most severe negative impacts through a company’s activities or business relationships'.
When we endorsed the UNGPs, we committed to identifying our salient human rights issues, which we first completed in 2015 (see this report (PDF 4.53 MB)). Since then, we have regularly reviewed these in line with best practice, with the most recent review conducted in 2023. During this process we engaged Twentyfifty, a human rights management consultancy, to support our assessment of both existing and emerging human rights issues.
Each of our salient issues is viewed through the lenses of gender and climate impact to understand the influence that these have on access to human rights.
Rationale for our changes
We have updated the framing of several issues, for example:
- Bullying and harassment was updated to mark the distinction between these two types of behaviour.
- Health was updated to broaden the issue from just occupational health and safety (which is still critical), to include the right to a healthy environment and other issues such as right to water and mental health.
- Fair wage and income was expanded to reflect and recognise the variety of ways that people across our value chain make their living.
- We are also more specific about the individual issue or group that we are talking about, for example with land rights (including Indigenous Peoples’ rights).
Keeping our salient human rights issues under review
Identifying our salient issues is vital to effectively prioritise our work. But this list is not exhaustive and we continue to strive to embed respect for all human rights in our value chain. We are clear that human rights abuses affect real people, in real ways and the impacts can be life-changing.
Global and regional salient issues
Our global salient human rights issues reflect the nature of our global business. There are several additional issues which are addressed through focused programmes. Child labour, for example, is an issue that we continue to address through regional and commodity specific initiatives where the risk is high, such as in cocoa producing regions of Western Africa.
We keep our salient human rights issues under review and monitor emerging trends such as those related to technology, data privacy and AI, which are developing at pace.
Our Salient Human Rights Issues Framework
We have a structured approach to address our salient issues through our Salient Issues Framework. By following the four elements of our Framework we are able to drive consistency and ensure our approach to each salient issue follows a similar model.
Description and impact
The description of the issue, which includes which stakeholders are impacted and how, how many people the issue affects and where they are, and the main root causes of the issue.
Theory of change
Our theory of change is based on this clear understanding of the problem we are trying to address, and enables us to set out our vision of the outcome we want to deliver.
Interventions
We then define areas of intervention – strategic priorities which will achieve the vision of the theory of change, with clear segmentation on where we will have the biggest impact on people.
Action plans
Our action plans outline what we need to do to achieve these priorities, how we will do this, and the internal and external stakeholders with whom we need to work to achieve our vision.
Collaboration is critical in addressing our salient human rights issues. This includes engaging directly with business partners to agree action plans which address the issues identified. We also actively engage in industry platforms and groups to drive industry improvements at scale. We communicate about this work through case studies and in our Annual Report and Accounts.