A human rights impact assessment is an adverse impact assessment performed to determine the human rights effects of a business activity on workers or community members.

For an HRIA to be successful, engagement with stakeholders and rights-holders is fundamental. An HRIA is assessed by the following criteria:

The comprehensive assessment of human rights impacts involves the following steps:

Source: Danish Institute for Human Rights

Business activities can have a wide range of consequences on human rights, thus EU taxonomy has incorporated businesses' responsibility for respecting human rights, including by identifying, avoiding, mitigating and remediating the human rights impacts with which they are involved through Minimum Safeguards.

The UN Guiding Principles have introduced the global standard that businesses are expected to exercise human rights due diligence. This includes the expectation that businesses assess and address their impacts, both those arising from operations and business relationships. HRIAs can be a key element of human rights due diligence and provide a process for businesses to understand and address their impacts in a specific project, activity or country context.

Notably, the UN Guiding Principles do not necessarily require that businesses conduct ‘human rights impact assessments’ but indicate that a range of approaches may be appropriate for assessing human rights impacts. Examples of approaches that have been developed include ‘stand-alone’ HRIA (i.e., assessments that focus exclusively on human rights) and ‘integrated’ assessments (e.g., approaches that integrate human rights into environmental, social and health impact assessments).

If you are wondering how the HRIA relates to other human rights standards and initiatives, have a look here at page 12.

For HRIA of projects and sites, the assessment should be conducted as early as possible in the project cycle or when business activities commence and should be repeated and re-evaluated at regular intervals and critical project gateways. For example, in the case of environmental and social impact assessment, a review every three to five years is considered good practice.

Human rights impacts should also be reassessed whenever the scale, scope or nature of the project or business activities changes, such as during project expansion or preparation for decommissioning and closure. Re-evaluation of HRIA results may also be appropriate when there are significant changes in social and political circumstances.

Timelines vary significantly based on the particular needs, resources, risks and context associated with the business project or activities. In planning and undertaking HRIA, it is important to recognise that the complexity of the assessment should be appropriately scaled to the particular context (e.g., the community context, whether it is ex-ante or ex-post, whether there are preexisting conflicts) and to the nature of the business project or activities (e.g., the size of the operation, the stage of operations, the specific location). This also applies to the consideration of how much time will be needed for the assessment.