Frequently Asked Questions

The Human Rights Self-Assessment tool is a training tool and is not intended to serve as a comprehensive human rights due diligence tool as outlined under the UN Guiding Principles on Business and Human Rights (UNGPs). Instead, it provides initial guidance to help companies embark on a fully-fledged human rights impact assessment.

The tool is accessible for trainers and participants of UNDP’s Human Rights Due Diligence training. For more information, please get in touch with the B+HR Asia team.

Heatmaps are generated based on the “Severity” and “Likelihood” of some human rights risk relevant to your industry.

The severity of a risk will be calculated from the average of the values you assign to the scale (the gravity or seriousness of the impact), scope (the number of people impacted) and irremediability (limit in the ability to restore those affected back to a situation at least the same as, or equivalent to, their situation before the adverse impact) of each risk in the tool.

You will define the likelihood of each risk weighing the probability that the risk could lead to a harm at your company’s own operating contexts and value chain.

After assigning these values to each risk displayed, your human rights risks heatmap will be generated by the tool and shared with you on the web site and in email.

The severity of a risk will be calculated from the average of the values you assign to the scale (the gravity or seriousness of the impact), scope (the number of people impacted) and irremediability (limit in the ability to restore those affected back to a situation at least the same as, or equivalent to, their situation before the adverse impact) of each risk in the tool.

Scale measures a totality of circumstances including: 1) nature and context of the abuse or treatment; 2) manner of the execution of the abuse and; 3) the status of the victim.

Nature of the abuse inflicted might involve considerations of the following factors:

• Physical impact of the treatment, for example, whether involves loss of life or lifelong physical debilitation
• mental or emotional impact, for example, if leads to permanent mental illness or involves temporary experience with humiliation
• extent it affects family and community relationships

Manner of the execution of the abuse might involve the following factors:

• duration of the abuse
• duration of mental and physical anguish
• whether physical person and/or property impacted
• whether livelihood destroyed or mitigated
• whether forcibly displaced and/or forced to take inadequate compensation
• whether involved purposeful targeting or flagrant disregard for human dignity

Status of the victim may have an impact on how scale is measured:

• man, or woman, non-binary or transgender
• gender preference, lesbian, gay, bi-sexual, or transgender
• age, adult or child
• state of health, including mental health of the victim
• disabilities status
• minority or underclass status
• whether vulnerability compounded by history of abuse suffered as a group
• High: the abuse involves severe impact on the physical, mental and/or emotional wellbeing of a person and/or communities; target community is considered especially vulnerable
• Medium: the abuse involves a moderate impact on the physical, mental and/or emotional wellbeing of people and/or communities
• Low: the abuse does not have long-term or substantive effect on the victims’ lives and does not target vulnerable populations

Scope is a measure of the number of people involved. It often involves an estimation of the size of the workforce impacted. However, it may also include an estimate of the size of the community impacted as well (e.g.: risks to the environment, land rights and public health).

• High: large number of people impacted, often includes members of the workforce AND others, including from surrounding communities
• Medium: moderately large number of people impacted, mostly in the workforce
• Low: small number of people impacted

Irremediability is a measure of the ability to restore someone’s rights. It often involves an estimate of the “promptness of action required” to restore the impacted individual’s rights to the same level prior to the business operations that affected it.

• High: unless action is taken immediately, the impact of human rights abuses can never be remedied
• Medium: unless action is taken soon, the impact of human rights abuses will not likely be remedied
• Low: action not required immediately in order to remedy the human rights abuse in full

Likelihood is based on the probability that the event leading to the impact will occur (again) in the future. The more likely the risk will lead to a harm, the higher the measure, and the more urgent it is to take action.

• High: the event has occurred in the operation several times per year, and will very likely occur again
• Medium: the event has occurred in the operation several times, and has occurred in the industry in the past
• Low: the event has never occurred in the operation, but it is possible it has occurred in the industry in the past

Responses provided

Your responses will be stored in the database of the website for up to 2 days after taking the assessment. Website administrators will have access to these responses, however, they will not regard them or use them as a resource considering that the training tool at this point only serves as a tool to illustrate the risk identification and prioritization process, thus, responses provided by training participants cannot be deemed truthful or representative.

Email address

When providing your email address to deliver the human rights heatmap, you can indicate whether you would like to receive updates from the UNDP Business and Human Rights Asia team. If you agree, your email will be added to our mailing list.

If you choose not to be contacted your email will be deleted from the website database after the delivery of your human risks heatmaps.

The heatmaps will be sent to you as an email attachment, to the address you specify. The results can be shared/forwarded freely. However, please make sure that that the disclaimer explaining that the results generated by a training tool are illustrative remain included in the attachment.

You can share the link to the HRSA website, where the FAQs and other information are publicly available. However, the tool itself is accessible only for trainers and participants of UNDP’s Human Rights Due Diligence Training. For more information, please get in touch with the B+HR Asia team.

HRDD requires wide stakeholder engagement. Thus, the tool in its current form is best used for training purposes. Please see under the questions What is this tool good for? and What is the tool not good for?

The UNDP B+HR Asia team is continuously refining the tool based on user-feedback. Subscribers of the UNDP B+HR Asia newsletter will be notified of all major developments and other HRDD tools launched by the team.

Please visit our Contact page.