France

By Daniel Morris | 27. November 2017

II. Business Responsibility to Respect Human Rights

6. Reporting [pages 44-45]

Businesses must monitor the human rights measures they adopt and disclose on their initiatives in this field.

Under European Directive 2014/95/EU, human rights will become one of the pillars of CSR. This position will be reflected in French reporting requirements when the directive is transposed into national law. It should be noted that human rights reporting is already a requirement under the regulatory provisions of the Commercial Code. Decree 2012-557 of 24 April 2012 on the social and environmental transparency obligations of businesses places human rights on an equal footing with other issues.

Proposal for Action No. 13

Actions Underway

  • France is continuing to implement monitoring indicators and communicate with external stakeholders on business commitments and enforcement under the UN Guiding Principles on Business and Human Rights.

Actions to be implemented

  • Implement provisions to help transpose the European Directive on non-financial reporting into French law.

The performance of measures adopted by businesses to respect and communicate on human rights can be monitored in the following ways:

− By using existing global and sector-specific indicators or new company-specific indicators, and by formalizing internal annual reporting systems for the actions implemented;

– By including points to be checked in existing internal supervisory mechanisms;

− By monitoring and addressing human rights incidents;

− By issuing annual reports that can be viewed by the public.

Existing tools and responsible practices:

– Businesses publish information on their human rights initiatives and operations on the Business and Human Rights Resource Centre website (www.businesshumanrights.org).

– The Global Reporting Initiative (GRI) has published G4 guidelines for sustainability reporting (https://www.globalreporting.org/information/g4/Pages/default.aspx).

− Shift and Mazars have developed the UN Guiding Principles Reporting Framework for companies to report on human rights (http://www.ungpreporting.org/).

− The Danish Institute for Human Rights has developed a set of 1,000 Human Rights Indicators for Business (HRIB), enabling businesses and stakeholders to evaluate their human rights policies, procedures and practices (http://businesshumanrights.org/en/platform-for-human-rights-indicators-for-business-hrib).