How to comply with Minimum Safeguards?

First, alignment with minimum safeguards must occur on the following 4 topics:

1. Human Rights
2. Bribery and Corruption
3. Taxation
4. Fair Competition

To ensure alignment on each of the four, there must be compliance with both the procedural and outcome element.

‍

Procedural Element

The procedural element examines whether a company has adequate due diligence procedures in place by assessing company reports on its policies, processes and practices on each topic.

1.     Human Rights

To determine that the due diligence procedures are adequate, companies are advised to:

• Examine the existing due diligence process against the OECD Guidelines and UNGPs;

- For EU companies: CSRD, CSDDD (if not yet applicable: use other data sources such as the World Benchmark Alliance);  

- For non-EU companies: WBA core UNGP indicators.

 
• Put in place policies to identify adverse impacts.
• Take action in respect of identified impacts.

Companies are advised not to:

• Disregard specific human rights risks inherent to your business model.
• Operate in jurisdictions with systematic human rights violations while not addressing such risks.
• Neglect known risks associated with your sector.

2.     Bribery and Corruption

• The company has developed adequate controls for preventing and
  detecting bribery.

3.     Taxation

• The company shall treat tax governance and compliance as
  important elements of oversight.
• It should have adequate tax risk management strategies.
• The assessments of tax compliance should extend to looking at tax
  avoidance through aggressive tax planning.

4.     Fair Competition

• The company promotes employee awareness of the importance of
  compliance with competition law.
• The company provides training to senior management on
  competition issues.

‍

Outcome Element

For the outcome element there must be checks on final convictions in court, a will to enter into a dialogue with an OECD NCP and to respond to any inquiries by the Business & Human Rights Resource Centre ('BHRRC').

With regards to human rights, the company must ensure:

• No final court convictions.
• No adverse findings by National Contact Points (NCP), which is the grievance mechanism built into the OECD Guidelines (until the company implements a due diligence system deeming the repetition of such breaches unlikely as evidenced by an external audit).
• No lack of engagement with an NCP in relation to a complaint (until the company implements a due diligence system deeming the repetition of such breaches unlikely as evidenced by an external audit).
• No lack of engagement with the BHRRC on any allegations it seeks to raise with the company (if there is no response to BHRRC for three months there is no alignment with minimum safeguards for two years).

As for the other three topics (Bribery and Corruption; Taxation; and Fair Competition), the outcome is based on the existence of final court convictions.

‍

‍