The International Corporate Accountability Roundtable (ICAR) and the European Coalition for Corporate Justice (ECCJ) have conducted structured assessments of current National Action Plans (NAPs) on business and human rights. To date, only four countries – the United Kingdom, the Netherlands, Denmark, and Finland – have released NAPs on business and human rights. At the same time, a number of other governments have begun the process of developing such NAPs or have publicly announced an intention to do so. As such, it is essential that the four existing NAPs be closely analyzed in terms of their content and processes in order to assess best practice and to suggest areas for improvement going forward.

The ICAR-ECCJ project has analyzed these four NAPs using the ICAR-DIHR NAPs Toolkit, released in June 2014. The NAPs Toolkit provides a set of 25 criteria by which NAPs can be assessed, covering both the content of NAPs and the process undertaken by States in developing them. The ICAR-ECCJ assessments of existing NAPs builds on the ICAR-DIHR NAPs Toolkit to help provide critical and structured feedback to States who have already developed NAPs and to provide a reference point for States that are on the path to developing them.

The full report, including a cross-assessment of NAPs to date and individual assessments of all four NAPs in both summary and checklist form, can be downloaded here.

For more on ICAR’s ongoing work on NAPs, including this report, please contact ICAR.