Why a human rights impact assessment for investment projects?
In recent years, corporate involvement in human rights has become a high-profile issue. In some cases, corporations have been directly responsible for the violation of human rights (abusive labour practices for example, forced evictions), while in other cases, they have been complicit in government violations (eg. using government security forces to suppress opposition to their business, providing technology that is used to suppress rights). In some cases, civil society organisations have identified abuses that companies failed to see, even when they have adopted explicit human rights policies. In some instances official government or UN enquiries have substantiated civil society’s allegations of human rights violations. Very often, local communities whose lives will be fundamentally transformed by investment projects lack information, access to decision-making authorities, and very frequently, pertinent information about their own human rights. NGOs or communities facing large-scale c
