Human Rights Impact Assessments: Trends, Challenges, And Opportunities for ICT Sector Adoption

Abstract

In our previous work, we sought to place human rights impacts assessments (HRIA) within their history. We showed how the institute is derived from a set of corporate practices that rest uncomfortably within different frameworks. On the one hand, HRIAs stem from the environmental impact assessments that were developed in the 1960s and 1970s as the legal and procedural mechanism to ensure that private companies respect minimum environmental standards defined by law and enforced by administrative agencies. On the other hand, HRIAs also operate within the obscure and ambiguous world of corporate social responsibility (CSR). Finally, we also showed how HRIAs are a preferred tool of a strange animal: the protect, respect and remedy (PRR) framework adopted by the United Nations in 2011, advanced by the UN Special Representative John Ruggie, who was actively supported by former SecretaryGeneral Kofi Annan.

Thus, our conceptual analysis placed HRIAs in a specific historical context: the one produced by the UN’s decision to step back from mandatory international treaties addressing the relationship between corporations and human rights and to adopt Ruggie’s more relaxed framework. That initial analysis ended with the introduction of different paths through which HRIAs could evolve. From our perspective, they will either be swallowed by the self-regulation framework of CSR or will become an increasingly juridified practice, pushed by either inter ational or national laws. The latter path, however, could look very different depending on how various regulatory possibilities are combined

This paper proceeds in the following way. First, we briefly review Ruggie’s PRR framework in which HRIAs seem—at this time—to be clearly standing. We move then to frame the main goal of this paper: to outline the potential, chal lenges and perils of the deployment of this tool in the ICT sector. We do this with some degree of hindsight, for several ICT companies have already moved in this direction and important multistakeholder initiatives such as the Global Network Initiative (GNI) have embraced it. But some caution is required, for it is still too early to tell where HRIAs in the ICT sector will move in the next few years. To an extent, their future path depends on broader regulatory challenges. The third section overviews how HRIAs were used by Facebook, one of the Internet companies that more heavily relied on the practice to study its impacts in different contexts. By closely looking at these HRIAs or their executive summaries we ob tain some insights in terms of how the assessment is produced on the field. The fourth section outlines a few preliminary conclusions regarding the limitations, weaknesses, challenges and potential of the use of HRIAs in the ICT sector. In particular,we focus on a certain lack of transparency that seems to affect the HRIAs we looked at and a lack of consensus on the scope of liability ICT companies should be subjected to, a problem that derives—in part—from a difficulty in establishing causal mechanisms between certain technological developments and specific human rights wrongs. The fifth and final section discusses these findings and advances a few hypotheses of the challenges lying ahead.