We help you and your team understand and meet your responsibilities with respect to human rights. We adapt our services and products to the specific needs of your company and take into account different maturity levels of human rights due diligence management across departments, subsidiaries, and supply chains. Our solutions ensure that you conduct business in line with international standards and frameworks on business and human rights.
Establishing Human Rights Due Diligence (HRDD) management systems for your company is our core business. We help you develop and implement a systematic approach to identify and manage any human rights risks. This entails the following steps, which can be performed separately or consecutively:
Human rights risk analysis:
In-depth human rights risk assessment:
Human rights impact assessment (HRIA):
Identifying the gaps between company’s existing policies, management systems, and practices and:
Identifying areas for improvement, providing strategic and practical recommendations to close gaps, and developing a due diligence roadmap with concrete steps for action that allows for integration of solutions into company’s existing management systems.
Policy development:
Governance structures:
Defining and implementing adequate measures to mitigate the human rights risks including:
Measuring human rights performance:
Reporting human rights performance:
In addition to our core business of establishing human rights due diligence management systems, we offer the following services:
We provide decision makers with in-depth research on difficult industry or country-specific situations. Our researchers are highly qualified and have produced numerous studies on business and human rights questions in challenging environments. We provide the following services to our clients:
Our research findings are directed at internal functions and executive management.
Legal developments can be abrupt und sometimes unexpected for companies. Understanding their implications for business operations is key to avoiding risks. Our legal team is routinely monitoring legal developments that impact human rights obligations of companies, including court rulings in key markets, and providing our clients with regular updates on how changes in the legal landscape can impact their business.
Directors and officers need to understand legislative developments and demands by clients and investors regarding human rights as well as their impact on business operations and supply chain management. Our executive briefings are highly customised and succinctly present the key information that is relevant for decisionmakers.
Enabling both your workforce and your suppliers to fully understand their company’s impact and to mitigate risks in a timely manner benefits more than just people and the planet – it also improves your company’s risk management, making it more agile and resilient for the future. Under the Löning Academy umbrella, we deliver standard and customised human rights training to employees, board members, and suppliers to expand knowledge and capabilities, reach alignment across teams, and strengthen human rights outcomes. Our training programmes can be delivered both in person and online and in various formats:
To learn more about Löning Academy training programmes click here.
Meaningful stakeholder engagement is a key success factor in conducting credible and effective human rights due diligence. Thanks to our extensive international network of stakeholder groups and partners, we are able to offer our clients the following support:
Mergers and acquisitions of companies involve inherent and often unquantifiable human rights risks. Incorporating human rights into the M&A due diligence process informs the buyer’s decision-making and may impact the valuation of the transaction. If unidentified and unmanaged, human rights issues linked to the target company’s operations or supply chains may give rise to real and significant risks in the form of reputational harm, regulatory penalties, and legal costs following the closing of the transaction.
Conducting human rights due diligence as part of the M&A process will help the buyer understand its risk exposure, plan risk management and mitigation, integrate internal processes post-closing and ultimately, preserve the value and sustainability of the asset. On the other hand, if conducted as vendor due diligence, it will provide the seller with a greater comfort in relation to the target’s human rights risks and with the ability to mitigate identified issues that may impact valuation before closing. Overall, effective human rights due diligence facilitates the speedy, efficient, and successful sale of the target and its assets.
As part of our human rights due diligence services in the M&A context, we identify and assess the target’s human rights risks, its existing risk management processes and its capacity to manage these risks. Thanks to our cross-industry knowledge on human rights risks and companies’ preparedness to manage such risks, we have mastered the art of asking questions and obtaining the necessary information and documentation from the target. We know where in the data room to look to detect hidden risks and which factors to consider when prioritizing the focus of risk assessments.
Our advisory team of human rights experts works at the pace of the transaction, coordinates closely with your M&A and legal teams, and maintains absolute confidentiality throughout the due diligence process.
ESG due diligence has become an integral part of investment decisions, but it often concentrates on the environmental risk factors. However, incorporating human rights risks into ESG due diligence the building block for a truly responsible investment. Effective human rights risk assessment is essential to understand the monetary risk that each new investment poses. It is also required by an increasing number of regulations such as the EU Taxonomy.
Investor engagement with portfolio companies to implement human rights can take different forms. Setting up adequate risk management systems is key to improving the human rights performance of portfolio companies.
As part of this service, we help investors establish risk management systems to screen investee companies for human rights risks and management maturity. We conduct human rights impact assessments and establish adequate human rights due diligence processes that will help qualify investment projects as sustainable. We engage with the management of portfolio companies on your behalf to improve their compliance with human rights standards.
