Nate Lankford is the Practice Lead for Business and Human Rights at Miller and Chevalier, and co-chair of the International Bar Association’s Business and Human Rights Committee. He is an anti-corruption expert whose practice focuses on matters involving the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act (FCPA) and other areas of international corporate compliance. Nate joins host Gwen Hassan to discuss the UNGP on Business and Human Rights and its role in ending forced labor.
 

 
The UN’s Guiding Principles on Business and Human Rights is a framework unanimously endorsed by the UN Human Rights Council in 2011. The framework is a broad consensus about a company’s responsibility to respect human rights – essentially, a company’s responsibility to ensure their actions aren’t interfering with someone’s ability to enjoy their rights. It also requires companies to do due diligence in identifying their human rights risks and facilitate effective remediation when they’ve identified that they’ve had adverse impacts.
 
“[The company must] evaluate the risks and severity from the lens of vulnerable stakeholders like a worker or community member,” Nate shares. The potential liability and economic consequences shouldn’t be the priorities when faced with a potential breach of human rights. It’s important to have meaningful stakeholder engagement in all stages of risk evaluation, and transparency is key to that process.
 
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Nate Lankford on LinkedIn