Essential ESG: Episode 26 – Insights From The 2025 UN Forum On Business And Human Rights

In the latest episode of Corrs' Essential ESG podcast, Dr Phoebe Wynn-Pope and Kate Gill-Herdman share insights from the 2025 United Nations Business and Human Rights Forum in Geneva.

This year's forum theme 'Accelerating action on business and human rights amidst crises and transformations' sparked discussions on how businesses can scale up implementation of the UN Guiding Principles on Business and Human Rights (UNGPs).

Phoebe and Kate explore key trends arising from discussions, including heightened human rights due diligence in conflict-affected and high-risk areas, the role of AI in supply chain risk management, and growing links between environmental and human rights accountability.

Essential ESG is a podcast series presented by Corrs that breaks down topical issues affecting the rapidly evolving environmental, social and governance landscape in Australia and beyond.

TRANSCRIPT

Phoebe Wynn-Pope, Head of Responsible Business and ESG, Corrs Chambers Westgarth

Kate Gill-Herdman, Special Counsel, Corrs Chambers Westgarth

Phoebe: Welcome to another edition of Essential ESG. My name is Phoebe-Wynn Pope I'm the Head of the Responsible Business and ESG Team here at Corrs Chambers Westgarth and I am joined today by Kate Gill-Herdman, who is a Special Counsel in our team.

Kate: Hi Phoebe.

Phoebe: Hi Kate. We're coming to you from the lands of the Wurundjeri people of the Kulin nation and we are really excited to reflect today and share some key takeaways from our recent attendance at the UN Forum on Business and Human Rights in Geneva. The forum is the world's largest annual gathering on business and human rights with thousands of multi-sector participants and this year the theme was really exploring how different stakeholders can accelerate and scale up the implementation of the UNGPs amidst what are significant global challenges, how innovation can be created and how there are opportunities for positive transformation.So there were lots of sessions that were particularly interesting for Australian businesses and today we will share with you some of our key insights and some of the emerging trends that we saw coming out of the forum. So Kate, the breadth of the sessions was enormous, we had three full days and pre-events and after events and side events.

Kate: It was huge, wasn't it? We had the opening session and then we had the Business and Human Rights working group out of 2026 work program including examining the adequacy of corporate governance and accountability for human rights at the C-suite and board level through to location specific multi-stakeholder initiatives designed to protect human rights. It was a huge range of things, I mean you will have some more things that stood out to you.

Phoebe: Yes, I think one of the things that really appeals to me about the forum, for those of our listeners who haven't been, is this enormous array of stakeholders. You go from representatives of States sitting and participating in the forum through to First Nations people from around the world in traditional dress, through to multinational corporations, NGOs, civil society, law firms like us. There is just such a huge array of people who are all interested in and working towards enhanced respect for human rights around the world and particularly in business activities. So, it's very inspiring, I think, in terms of thinking about what that looks like.

Kate: I totally agree and one of the things that struck me with that range of participants really is how the level of decorum I think, when you have got such diverse perspectives in a room, just the way that people were able to ask questions, answer questions and share what they are doing, I thought was terrific.

Phoebe: Yes and I think that there is a little bit of pressure at times, there are different and divergent views and people with very different perspectives and sometimes that creates a little bit of tension in the room, but that's not a bad thing because that's part of the life cycle of accountability and transparency that's required for us to be able to do this well.

Kate: Yes, I completely agree. So, Phoebe as a long-time participant in the annual forum, what were some of your key observations from the sessions?

Phoebe: I think one of the things, and I know we are going to get onto human rights due diligence and some of the more common themes, but one of the things that struck me this year was a lot of discussion around conflict-affected and high-risk areas so CAHRAs for short and the need for business to undertake that heightened human rights due diligence. The fact that heightened human rights due diligence isn't just doing due diligence harder but really requires that conflict sensitivity assessment of, what is your impact on the conflict and on the situation in the environment that you are going into and all the complexities that that has. So, that was kind of a common theme that went through quite a few of the sessions, I think, and even just in the sense of resource extraction, the need for critical minerals and we've talked about this on the podcast before, this sort of drive into new areas and new countries and what that means and the sort of human rights due diligence that companies need to be thinking about.

Kate: Yes I found that really interesting too and really moving into obviously the recognition that we need to operate in these spaces but how we do them responsibly having regard to our commitments to respect human rights as businesses.

Phoebe: Yes and aligned with that I think is this recognition that there's a huge amount of capital flowing into the defence sector so it's not really directly aligned but closely aligned to this sort of sense of an increased geopolitical insecurity, complexity, people talking about the polycrisis and what that means for business operating. But the new principles for responsible defence investment that have been in development are super interesting in recognising these big shifts in the economy in the way governments are spending money but also in the way private sector is being encouraged to participate in the development of a new kind of defence infrastructure for a future and the complexity of that.

Kate: Yes, complexity was certainly a theme that came across in many of the sessions but just sticking with the principles for responsible defence investment, one of the things that struck me about the discussion about those principles is how we develop a set of principles that takes into account the ethical positions of some investors, through to pure financial assessment and also the analytical challenges, so looking at three criteria for assessing defence investment. So percentage of revenue, product, so controversial weapons and then conduct-based approach. For example, who those weapons are being sold to and Phoebe something that falls clearly within your expertise then is the understanding of international humanitarian law in those contexts as another overlay of the complexity.

Phoebe: Absolutely and then we, if you're thinking about using international law to help define exclusions and other things and those treaties and what are prohibited weapons, what are controversial weapons and how people are thinking about that. I think one of the things that was interesting in the consultation on the principles was that there was no agreement really amongst investors about how they were thinking about those things and everybody was making their own path forwards and how these principles are going to be developed in a way that is able to be adopted by a wide range, a broad-church if you like, of different sorts of investors with different risk appetites, is going to be really interesting. So, I think this is a space to watch, there's a lot of work to be done in this area and I know, we are doing a lot of work and thinking around what this looks like but the complexities of dual use technologies, for example, how are we investing in dual use technologies and protecting against the human rights risks of those technologies being deployed for purposes that may not be legitimate defence purposes or may not be seen as legitimate defence purposes or for purposes that have significant human rights impacts. That might be technology, surveillance technology which is then used by certain States to identify human rights defenders for example or whatever it is, there is a wide range and a very broad spectrum of human rights due diligence that needs to be undertaken in this area which is very interesting indeed.

Kate: Yes, it really is. One of the things that struck me about the consultation was just the merging of the defence and the tech sectors together and companies ostensibly being tech companies and not thinking of themselves as defence or military companies. I think these principles are much needed and will provide some I suppose delineation of what we are actually talking about in this space. And Phoebe there was, completely shifting subject matter here, but there was also a number of interesting discussions around the use of AI and how AI can really assist business and human rights practitioners with their human rights due diligence, wasn't there?

Phoebe: Yes, I really love the discussions around AI because I think often we are focusing on the risks of AI and we've done a lot of work on this and also a podcast of that need to deploy AI responsibly and all of those sorts of things. But we heard from a few different people who were using AI to really enhance their capacity to identify risk, identify harmful impacts and to really add a very strong data component into their human rights due diligence. And while they were still keeping the human in the loop and making sure that people were involved in those assessments, it was really helping with scalable approaches to supply chain due diligence in particular for organisations that have got massive numbers of suppliers, anything from 10,000 to 20,000 to 100,000 suppliers. So really interesting uses of AI to enhance human rights due diligence to protect against human rights harms and enabling really in some instances up to the doubling of the detection of high severity issues which they could then insert human time into investigating further and really understanding the impacts. And I thought that was really exciting to come to be hearing about some of those innovations in a very positive way.

Kate: Yes I did too and I think you've captured that really nicely. Just one of the things that really stood out to me was the comment that AI can detect - which is self-evident really but just in this context was interesting - that AI can detect patterns of behaviour that we humans can't detect which really boosts the capability in the initial risk identification phase, I thought that was really interesting.

Phoebe: And while we're talking about due diligence, the other aspect and there was a lot on due diligence as we would expect at the business and human rights conference but the other aspect that came up in many panels was the link to environmental due diligence, so this need for much greater synergy and integration between environmental impact assessments and environmental due diligence that happens under a whole range of environmental laws in a whole range of different jurisdictions and linking that due diligence process much better to the human rights due diligence. So if you're identifying environmental impacts or you're mitigating against environmental impacts, thinking really clearly about what that looks like in terms of if you're having an environmental impact, is there also a human rights impact as a consequence of that. So if waterways are being moved or if water is being impacted, what is the human rights impact of that on the local community and linking those up much better than we have in the past. I thought that was - it feels self-evident, but also the emphasis on that at this forum was very interesting.

Kate: I agree, linking those two approaches to due diligence is self-evident but also there was some discussion around the differences between disciplines of human rights due diligence and environmental impact assessment or due diligence and the different approaches as well as the different linguistics or language that we use between those two teams and really getting to some of the cultural change that needs to happen within organisations to bring those disciplines together in a way that can be efficient and effective. There was also discussion around greater accountability for environmental harms with several jurisdictions looking to implement criminal responsibility for severe environmental harms . So laws have been introduced in Chile, looking at laws in Brazil and also strengthening laws across the EU. There was a lot of discussion around 'ecocide' wasn't there Pheobe?

Phoebe: Yes the use of ecocide was commonly used, not a term that is explicitly defined or agreed in international law. There is a proposed definition of ecocide and there is a big push to introduce that. But in the meantime this enhanced kind of criminal responsibility and penalties for an individual criminal responsibility and penalties for environmental harm, is a very interesting trend to watch. So this idea of accountability more broadly is always a strong theme at the UN forum. Beyond the environmental accountability, there was quite a lot of discussion about general accountability gaps from the side of the NGOs and civil society. So talking about a general lack of criminal accountability for human rights harms and issue with the corporate veil which is always a complaint and something that's an issue for many civil society members. The difficulty of access for courts for victims not having enough legal standing, so cases that are thought to be legitimate cases not actually getting heard and then on top of all of that concerns around the rise of strategic litigation against public participation cases or commonly known as 'slap cases' where there seems to be a big differential in power between the corporates and between civil society or human rights defenders and that these cases are brought really just to stop that sort of active engagement by human rights defenders. There was a plea from many human rights defenders on many panels and in many discussions around the forum for business to see rights holders not so much as informants or as people with grievances but actually as critical stakeholders who can help to identify problems that you might have and risks that you might have but also to help identify solutions and that collaboration piece between business and civil society came through very strongly in one panel which had Oxfam and Raks Thai, a Care affiliate talking about the multi-stakeholder collaboration that they have in the fisheries industry right from fisherman through to refrigeration, to transportation, to government, actors, to civil society, to workers, to unions, all working together to really enhance that response and protection for workers and enhancing corporate efficiencies in many ways by strengthening this human rights due diligence ultimately.

Kate: Yes. That was such a terrific example and just the trust and relationship building that Oxfam did in that space was really - it was so great to hear about that. Just back to the human rights defenders and the role of human rights defenders, one of the interesting things I thought from the investment perspective was investors now starting to ask business for policy commitments to protect human rights defenders. Recognising I think the important role that they have to play as one of the stakeholders in promoting business respect for human rights. The other interesting observation again from a number of investors was this concept of remedy readiness. So investors looking for, not only a policy commitment to remedy, but through their stewardship and engagement programs really wanting to understand whether businesses had in place, how they would investigate a grievance. Did they have the capacity, the capability, what would they do, particularly in high risk areas or conflict-affected areas, looking at well when an impact does happen, because they often do, how will you respond, what corrective action will you take, what remediation will you put in place which I thought was a really, it shows I think that investors are not just looking at do you have policy commitment and are you doing human rights due diligence, but when an impact occurs what are you going to do.

Phoebe: Yes that impact theme right throughout the conference was really critical I think shifting us from looking only at the risks to that impact which we discussed a bit earlier.

Kate: Phoebe, I'm conscious that we've kept our listeners listening for quite a while but one more thing we did want to talk about was a theme across a number of sessions around the business case for human rights and a number of reports that had been released, one of them at the forum. The first is a report by the UNDP looking at precisely what is the business case for human rights in a positive sense so identifying a correlation between better respect for human rights and return on assets, it's a fairly limited study and it's going to be built on. And the other which we have seen I think often voiced is the consequences or the financial impact for business when you don't do respect for human rights well. So thinking about the cost of litigation and reputational harm. And Pheobe we've discussed a little bit why we thought those reports were starting to permeate given these were discussions, the business case for human rights were something that was had quite a number of years ago.

Phoebe: Yes and I thought we thought that was settled that the business case was well understood but in the current environment where there's a lot of pressure on budgets and on business activity, clearly the need for the business case to be reiterated, not only in I suppose in some ways in moral terms and in terms of risk of litigation, but also in that positive term that good human rights respect across your value chain so in your workforce and in your supply chain will bring about business benefits. So there's lots of reasons why organisations should do it well. There's lots of need for specialists in this area. We did hear that there was a bit of a lack of expertise in Europe with the increase in demand for people to be doing this work so we sort of ended up with that business case very strongly being reiterated and sort of onwards and upwards to continue doing the work, lots of complexities, lots of things for people to be thinking about and on this day when we're launching this podcast which is Human Rights Day - International Human Rights Day on the 10th of December - it's just a good time I think to remember people around the world who are working in incredibly difficult circumstances and in some instances for businesses that are not rights respecting, and to reflect how far we've come but how much further there is to go.

Kate: Thank you Pheobe I think you've ended our podcast on a great note, and a call for a bit of a pause for reflection, I think that's terrific.

Phoebe: Thanks Kate. It's been fun talking to you.

Kate: Thanks Pheobe.

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