Human Rights Day: The Role of Business in Respecting People and Their Rights

NORTHAMPTON, MA / ACCESSWIRE / December 8, 2023 / SAP

Feature by Christine Susanne Mueller

On December 10, 2023, we celebrate the 75th anniversary of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. It's a day to honor and remember the universality and indivisibility of human rights.

For this occasion, I sat down with SAP Chief Sustainability Officer Daniel Schmid and Stephanie Raabe, human rights officer at SAP, to explore what role enterprises including SAP play, what's new in the company's recently updated human rights commitment statement, and what trends and challenges both see for human rights in business.

Q: Daniel, what do human rights mean to you? And why is it important for businesses to respect human rights?

Daniel Schmid (DS): Human rights are basic rights for all people to live a life in dignity and be treated equally. For me it's about ensuring a good life for all within the planetary boundaries. And businesses have a key role to play in this. While they can be a force for good around the world, they can also harm people and the planet; for example, through discrimination, unsafe working conditions, or industrial pollution and accidents with implications on human health. That is why the United Nations Guiding Principles (UN GPs) for Business and Human Rights not only set out the responsibility of states to protect human rights, but also the responsibility of business to respect human rights.

Q: How does this look in practice? How do companies in general and SAP specifically live up to their responsibility to respect human rights?

Stephanie Raabe (SR): Globally recognized frameworks such as the UN GPs or the OECD Guidelines for Multinational Enterprises on Responsible Business Conduct provide clear guidance for companies. They describe how to establish ongoing human right due diligence processes to "know and show" where a company's actual and potential negative impacts on people are and what actions are taken to prevent or mitigate these. This also entails tracking the effectiveness of actions taken over time, and communicating about efforts and results - internally and externally.

More than two years ago, we launched an interdisciplinary human rights due diligence project at SAP to take our existing human rights commitment statement, governance, processes, and disclosure to the next level and prepare for compliance with rising legal requirements such as the modern slavery acts in UK, Australia, or Canada, the German Supply Chain Due Diligence Act (LkSG), and the upcoming EU Corporate Sustainability Due Diligence Directive. We identified gaps in our policies and procedures, which we have been working to close.