By Min Aung, GNI Assessment and Accountability Manager
In early August, GNI published an article about five fundamental changes that have been made for the fifth assessment cycle to recognize the needs of our membership for a dynamic, adaptable, meaningful, and efficient assessment process that addresses the evolution of GNI, its members, and the external environment. This blog is the third in this series exploring these changes in detail. Please also see other blogs on regulatory adaptations and adaptations to new forms of government interventions.
As set out in GNI’s Accountability, Policy & Learning Framework and the Assessment Toolkit, one objective of the GNI assessment process is to identify topics that would benefit from additional learning and discussion among GNI members. The Assessment Report from the third assessment cycle, which concluded in 2019, identified human rights due diligence (HRDD) as a topic for further engagement, noting “companies are evolving their approaches by integrating impact assessment into wider due diligence systems, which vary from company to company, and even within companies, with regard to products, markets, and other topics and types of risks. Several assessments noted the importance of standalone HRIAs at varying levels, from global company HRIAs to those focused on specific countries, issues, or business decisions. Relatedly, some assessments illustrated the importance of having procedures that are fit-for-purpose and designed for rapid and efficient deployment. Other areas for future learning within GNI include the identification of good practices for HRDD on research and development and product design, as well as collective work by GNI members to inform HRDD on emerging issues.”
Also Read: Adapting the GNI Assessments for Mandatory Due Diligence Regulations
To explore these issues in more detail, GNI established a HRDD Working Group in 2020 and held extensive discussions across 2021. One output of the Working Group was the development of the Across the Stack (XTS) tool, together with our colleagues at Business for Social Responsibility (BSR). The XTS Tool is designed to help actors across the technology ecosystem identify and address relevant high-level human rights issues and due diligence questions, as well as to understand ways in which risks and mitigation opportunities may cut across various layers of the ICT stack. The tool has already inspired the creation of other human rights impact assessment tools, including a community-led human rights impact assessment tool (CLARITI) developed by GNI members Article 19 and Ranking Digital Rights.
The need for more sophisticated risk and mitigation analysis has become increasingly clear to GNI as our membership has expanded to include companies offering products and services that span the stack from vendors of sophisticated networking equipment through Cloud, network, and Internet service providers, all the way to various content-delivery platforms. The XTS tool is also part of the corpus of documents used in the adaptation of GNI’s fifth cycle assessment process to account for the varying impacts of government restrictions and demands on freedom of expression and privacy rights based on, among other factors, a company’s business model and the technical capabilities of their products and services to view and influence data and content based on its position in the ecosystem.
Starting with our fourth assessment cycle, GNI has provided non-public guidance that helps assessors understand and ask questions about the range of government restrictions and demands that may be placed on each type of service. This guidance helps assessors create tailored and comprehensive assessment reports, which in turn allow GNI’s multistakeholder Accountability Committee and Board to engage in more relevant discussions and provide more useful feedback during company assessment reviews. This guidance was supplemented with additional information ahead of the fifth cycle of assessments, including learnings drawn from the HRDD WG and other GNI spaces. This includes more detailed information about the different, relevant risks that companies may face when providing different types of ICT products or services. It also includes a detailed adaptation of the GNI framework specific to network equipment vendors.
In addition to these tools and resources, GNI enhanced the training that we require assessors to complete in order to be accredited. This included more rigorous pre-reading, in-training contribution, and group exercises that covered both the Process Review and Case Study sections of the assessment and illustrated some of the differences between companies that are noted above. For the first time, all members of each assessor team were required to pass a test at the end of the training.
We anticipate that these suggested adaptions to the fifth cycle assessment process for the services provided by our members, together with more rigorous assessor training, have equipped assessors to conduct comprehensive and relevant assessments to aid GNI’s multistakeholder Accountability Committee and Board in making their respective determinations on each company’s good faith implementation of the GNI Principles on Freedom of Expression and Privacy with improvement over time.