The road to sustainable development, just green transition and responsible recovery goes through respect for people and the planet. As the authoritative global framework for preventing and addressing adverse business-related human rights impacts, the United Nations Guiding Principles on Business and Human Rights (UNGPs) are a foundational tool for addressing these major collective challenges.

As the UNGPs turned 10 in June 2021, the UN Working Group on Business and Human Rights,1 mandated by the Human Rights Council to promote dissemination and implementation of the UNGPs worldwide, took stock of the first decade of implementation. The stocktaking highlighted that the UNGPs have led to significant progress by providing a common framework for all stakeholders in managing business-related human rights risks and impacts. Yet, considerable challenges remain when it comes to coherent implementation with respect to ensuring better protection and prevention of adverse human rights impacts, with particular attention to the most marginalized and vulnerable, and to ensuring access to remedy for harms that occur.
Therefore, what we need now for the next decade is to raise the ambition and increase the pace of implementation, to improve coherence and create greater impact.

This document – the UNGPs 10+ Roadmap for the next decade – follows the stocktaking, complementing the assessment of the first decade with forward-looking recommendations for the next one. Building on the stocktaking analysis of achievements to date and existing challenges and opportunities, it sets out key action areas for the road ahead and for progressively getting closer to fuller UNGPs realization. Each action area identifies priority goals for what needs to happen and supporting actions to be taken by States and businesses as well as other key stakeholders, all playing a role in realizing UNGPs implementation. Its ultimate objective echoes that of the UNGPs themselves—that they should be translated to practice so as to “achieve tangible results for affected individuals and communities, and thereby also contributing to a socially sustainable globalization.”

The stocktaking and the Roadmap are results of the Working Group’s UNGPs 10+ project, which has been supported by a wide-ranging multi-stakeholder consultation process.

The Working Group has identified eight action areas for moving faster and with greater ambition to support the overall urgent need for more coherent action. The Roadmap elaborates on the priority goals connected to each action area, setting out what needs to happen over the next decade to scale up UNGPs integration and implementation and corresponding supporting actions to be taken by States and businesses, as well as other stakeholders.

Read full report here.