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2004, Danish Institute for Human Rights

The Human Rights Compliance Assessment (HRCA) is a diagnostic tool designed to help companies detect potential human rights violations caused by the effect of their operations on employees, local residents and all other stakeholders. The tool has been under development by the Human Rights & Business Programme at the Danish Institute for Human Rights (DIHR) since 1999, and is a joint venture between the Danish Institute for Human Rights, the Confederation of Danish Industries (DI), and the Danish Industrialization Fund for Developing Countries (IFU), with the support of the Danish government (DANIDA). The aim of this cooperation has been to develop a widely accessible resource tool to help companies deal with human rights issues relevant for their particular operations. When the full tool is released, it will be the most comprehensive tool on the market defining company responsibility towards human rights.

 The entire tool runs on a database containing over 350 questions and 1.000 corresponding human rights indicators, developed from the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, the 1966 Dual Covenants and over 80 other major human rights treaties and conventions. The full HRCA will be published in 2005 as an interactive computer programme and will allow each company to select and modify the information in the database to suit their type of business and area of operations. The standards and indicators are updated on an annual basis, based on feedback from both company users and human rights groups, to ensure that the tool addresses the real life problems faced by companies and to reflect changes/developments in international human rights law.

The Human Rights Compliance Assessment (HRCA) is also computer-based tool which was created to help companies with human rights related aspects of corporate social responsibility. The HRCA takes companies through a series of questions and indicators that test for a company's compliance with its human rights obligations. It is a practical tool which was mapped against the guidelines of the Global Reporting Initiative (GRI), and which can assist companies with GRI and Global Compact reporting.

To view the online-based tool, please click here.