Human Rights Due-Diligence Roadmap

Human Rights Due-Diligence Roadmap

Turn your commitment to respecting human rights into practical, accountable action.

Explore how your organisation’s decisions, operations, and business relationships may affect people—and what you can do to prevent harm, address impacts, and support remedy.

This template brings five connected areas of human-rights due diligence into one visual planning space. Guided questions and dedicated brainstorming areas help teams identify gaps, connect responsibilities, and shape a roadmap for ongoing action.

Who is this template for?

Sustainability and human-rights practitioners, leadership teams, procurement, human resources, legal, compliance, risk, and operations professionals. It also supports consultants and facilitators helping organisations develop or review their approach to responsible business.

Use it to start a due-diligence process, review existing practices, explore a particular value chain, or align teams around priorities. Work individually to prepare an initial assessment, or bring colleagues together to challenge assumptions and agree responsibilities.

Before you begin

Define the business, geography, product, service, or relationship you want to explore. Gather available policies, supplier information, workforce data, previous assessments, stakeholder feedback, and grievance-process insights.

For an initial workshop, allow approximately two to three hours with four to ten participants. This is a suggested starting point; detailed assessment and meaningful stakeholder engagement will require further work.

Include people who understand relevant business decisions and working conditions. Plan how affected people’s perspectives will inform the process safely. Avoid recording names, identifiable complaints, or sensitive personal information on a shared workshop board.

How to use the Human Rights Due-Diligence Roadmap

1. Set the commitment and scope

Clarify your organisation’s commitment to respecting human rights, the activities and relationships in scope, and the standards and requirements that need review.

Identify potentially affected groups and agree who is accountable for decisions, delivery, and escalation. Capture gaps in policy, governance, or expertise.

2. Map people and human-rights risks

Trace the value chain from sourcing through operations, distribution, use, and end of life. Explore where activities or relationships could adversely affect workers, communities, customers, or other people.

Identify groups facing heightened risks and record missing information or perspectives. Keep the focus on risks to people, alongside the business processes connected to those risks.

3. Prioritise action and embed responsibility

Explore the severity of potential and actual impacts, including how serious and widespread harm could be and how difficult it would be to put right.

Identify prevention and mitigation measures, then examine the decisions that influence outcomes: purchasing, recruitment, product design, security, data practices, investment, and partner management. Assign owners and identify the resources needed.

4. Prevent, mitigate, and enable remedy

Plan how to act with business partners and affected stakeholders. Explore safe consultation, accessible ways to raise concerns, and processes for responding when harm occurs.

Record actions, responsibilities, and questions requiring specialist input. Consider whether proposed measures could shift costs or risks onto people with less power.

5. Track progress, communicate, and improve

Choose indicators that help you understand whether actions are reducing risks and improving people’s experiences.

Plan how stakeholder feedback, incidents, and independent information will inform reviews. Agree how progress and limitations will be communicated, who will challenge results, and when the roadmap will be updated.

Facilitation tips

Begin each section with individual reflection, then share and group sticky notes. Label evidence, assumptions, unanswered questions, and proposed actions clearly.

Make disagreements and missing perspectives visible. An internal workshop provides a starting point for assessment and engagement; it cannot substitute for listening to affected people.

Finish by choosing immediate next steps, each with an owner, deadline, and expected result.

What will you leave with?

A shared view of your due-diligence scope, an initial map of potentially affected people and human-rights risks, and priorities for further assessment and action.

You’ll also have draft responsibilities, stakeholder-engagement needs, and a review plan to guide continued work. The board supports planning; it does not itself verify compliance or demonstrate that impacts have been addressed.