Elonnai Hickok, Managing Director, Global Network Initiative

As the OECD Guidelines on Multinational Enterprises and UN Guiding Principles on Business and Human Rights make clear, businesses have a responsibility to respect human rights in their activities and throughout their value chains. Under the Action Coalition for Responsible Technology, part of the Danish Government’s Tech for Democracy Initiative, Business for Social Responsibility (BSR), Global Network Initiative (GNI), the OHCHR Business and Technology Project – B-tech, and the Danish Institute for Human Rights (DIHR), have developed several resources to support more rights respective decision making across the digital ecosystem. A central resource is the “Across the Stack Human Rights Due Diligence Tool,” developed by GNI and BSR, which provides a broad mapping of the technology ecosystem in order to identify relevant overlaps and intersections between different technologies and actors and help identify and address high level human rights issues and due diligence “questions”. The tool was inspired by the understanding that technology and human rights challenges are system-wide, not company-specific, and industry actors may need to take coordinated action to address a given risk or impact.