Mapping Grievance Mechanisms in the Business and Human Rights Arena

Abstract

This document forms part of the research background to a project of the Corporate Social Responsibility Initiative at Harvard University's John F. Kennedy School of Government. The project is focused on mechanisms for resolving grievances in the business and human rights arena. It aims to examine the strengths and weaknesses of existing grievance mechanisms in order to highlight lessons to be drawn from their experience, consider how they might be improved and explore what model mechanisms might look like for the field of business and human rights. This mapping sets out in summary form a range of existing grievance mechanisms from a variety of different contexts, whether industry or multi-industry, national, regional or international, private or public, based on law or voluntary standards. The aim here is to describe the mechanisms as factually as possible in order to provide a platform for further analysis as to how effective these mechanisms are and how well they are implemented in practice, but such judgments are not the purpose of this work. The common denominator among the mechanisms is that they a) address the impacts of corporations, b) explicitly or implicitly reference human rights and c) are non-judicial. Their purpose is to find resolutions to grievances outside the judicial process for various reasons such as cost saving, time saving, a desire to avoid confrontation and a need to protect the integrity of an institution or initiative. Some of the mechanisms can proceed in parallel with judicial processes; others are intended to avoid the need for judicial processes and some take effect once a case is filed with a judicial body in order to encourage parties to come to a resolution prior to any judgment.