Canon, a global leader in professional and consumer imaging equipment, information systems, and industrial equipment, sought our support to enhance their approach to human rights.
While the company already had good foundations, they recognised the need to align more explicitly with global standards in order to meet increasing stakeholder expectations to respect human rights. They also sought our advice to evaluate the human rights risks identified by the firm and the methodology used and to recommend improvements.
We began by benchmarking Canon’s policy and practices against the most influential global standard: UN Guiding Principles for Business and Human Rights. We also drew on the Corporate Human Rights Benchmark methodology for the ICT sector and the OECD Due Diligence Guidance for Responsible Business Conduct. This helped us identify potential gaps and improvement opportunities to strengthen the identification and management of human rights risks.
We also identified a number of additional relevant human rights risks in their supply chain and suggested improvements to their methodology, grievance mechanisms, monitoring, metrics, and governance and accountability framework. We helped Canon’s human rights promotion secretariat team to evaluate the outcomes and discuss their implementation at interactive workshops.
As a result of this work, the client has a better understanding of where it needs to focus to meet growing expectations to respect human rights in its business and supply chain – and why.
It also has an improved Human Rights Policy that communicates its commitment and expectations on human rights.
The outcomes were published in depth in Canon’s Sustainability Report 2022 and provided enhanced information for their evaluation in the Corporate Human Rights Benchmark.