The Centre for Human Rights, University of Pretoria (UP), in collaboration with Shift, will be hosting a two-day multi-stakeholder meeting of experts concerning the Valuing Respect project - a project aimed at evaluating how companies understand and give effect to their responsibility to respect human rights. The consultation will take place on 30 and 31 October 2019. 

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For two days, members of academia, the business community, civil society, government and the investment community will converge at the Centre for Human Rights to discuss the development of tools and insights that can help both companies and their stakeholders focus their resources on actions that effectively improve outcomes for people. This group of experts is being convened to deliberate on the development of new indicators, principles and tools to measure business respect for human rights - the essence of companies’ social performance. The consultation forms part of the three-year Valuing Respect project led by Shift - a global collaborative platform to research and co-create better ways of evaluating business respect for human rights. You can find updates about the project at www.shiftproject.org/valuing-respect. The project is generously funded by the Ministry of Foreign Affairs Finland, the Norwegian Ministry of Foreign Affairs, and Norges Bank Investment Management.

In the course of the first 18-months of the project, there has been widespread consultation with numerous people from diverse sectors. Discussions have been held in Europe, South-East Asia, Sub-Saharan Africa and North America. Together with the project’s three regional partners, including the Centre for Human Rights at UP, empirical research was conducted to identify the problems with how we currently measure corporate human rights performance. 

At the consultation, we look forward to sharing the projects progress in more detail, and in particular to reflect on draft indicators and tools aimed at: 

1. Supporting companies and their stakeholders to focus on human rights risks inherent in business models; and 
2. Evaluating the extent to which a company’s leadership and governance supports - or undermines - a rights- respecting culture.

Attendance is strictly by invitation.

For more information, please contact:

Mark Hodge                                                                                     
Project Lead, Valuing Respect                                                           
Shift                                                                                                    
mark.hodge@shiftproject.org                                                            
www.shiftproject.org                                                                 

OR 

Dr Oyeniyi Abe
Centre for Human Rights
University of Pretoria
oo.abe@up.ac.za
www.chr.up.ac.za