Human Rights

Our team bring their practical experience in business and human rights to help navigate this highly interconnected and complex field. We assist clients to operate in a manner that respects and advances human rights, which positively contributes to their social licence to operate and shareholder value.

Policy development

A Human rights policy is an important step a company can take towards meeting its corporate responsibility to respect human rights. We help our clients with developing their organisation-wide commitment, policy and actions to respect human rights in accordance with the UN Guiding Principles of Business and Human Rights and core International Human Rights Instruments. When developing policies and position statements, we ensure that there is alignment with international and sector-specific standards and help our clients to determine its most salient issues to guide a more strategic approach to human rights.

Risk and impact assessments

Human rights risk and impact assessments are critical to understanding the likelihood and severity of human rights issues that exist or can arise across our client’s own operations, supply chain, joint-ventures, and strategic partnerships. We perform desk-based human rights impacts assessments and detailed level assessments via direct external stakeholder engagement with potentially affected communities and individuals. Assessments can be undertaken at the corporate level or country/site/product level or tailored to specific human rights themes such as modern slavery impacts in the supply chain.

Building capabilities

The ‘Protect, respect and remedy’ framework outlined in the United Nations Guiding Principles on Business and Human Rights gave rise to a new era of respect for and advancement of the rights of all. It not only catalysed greater engagement between States and the business community, it has also contributed to the introduction of a range of guidelines, frameworks, standards and regulations that organisations need to understand and manage. For many within organisations, including seasoned Sustainability practitioners, this is a new field and there is a lot to navigate and understand.

We help our clients by providing training, delivering presentations, and conducting workshops on human rights and modern slavery to build internal capabilities. We also support organisations in their disclosures in accordance with the UNGP Reporting Framework and the Corporate Human Rights Benchmark.

Modern slavery

Legislation designed to help combat modern slavery and human trafficking has emerged in Australia and in multiple jurisdictions globally, including the United States and United Kingdom, as well as several European countries. We help our clients meet their compliance obligations under the Australian Modern Slavery Act’s Reporting Requirement. This includes performing Risk Assessments of modern slavery practices in our client’s own operations and supply chains, gap analyses of internal systems and processes, and the development and implementation of Modern Slavery Action Plans to improve performance over time. We also provide support in the development of annual Modern Slavery Statements, including internal engagement and sign-off processes.

Human rights remedy

Businesses need to be considering human rights issues and remediation in their day-to-day operations. This may already be happening in some ways, such as through occupational health and strategy or workplace discrimination mechanisms, but there is a great need to systematize, embed and upscale these processes. Most of today’s incidents, complaints and concern-raising channels are not fit for purpose for all human rights issues like modern slavery. We help clients develop industry best-practice Remediation Action Plans and processes in response to State-based and other grievance channels and in line with the UN Guiding Principles on Business and Human Rights.

Action plans

Point Advisory is passionate about human rights and assisting businesses to develop the appropriate policies, due-diligence, remedy and grievance mechanisms to help them to protect, respect and advance human rights within their own operations and supply chains. We help develop internally agreed Human Rights Action Plans that involve stakeholders from across our client’s departments and teams.

We also support our clients’ aspirations to advance human rights through the development of investment and impact programs designed to support vulnerable people and communities. We also assist our clients to ensure their human rights aspirations are aligned to their action plans relating to disability and accessibility, diversity and inclusion, financial inclusion, consumer vulnerability and indigenous reconciliation.

Discuss your Human Rights requirements

Contact us today and one of our experienced team members will get back to you to discuss your requirements. Our approach combines technical, commercial and financial expertise to provide outcomes that deliver tangible benefits to our clients.

Discuss your Human Rights requirements

Human Rights Projects

Human Rights Contacts