A/HRC/50/56 3. Delivering or enabling remedy for human rights harms 41. In accordance with the Guiding Principles, if harm has occurred in connection with a business’s activities, products or services, the company is expected to engage in remedial action, either through its own remediation mechanism or by participating in one (guiding principle 22). When companies have in place credible and effective mechanisms for stakeholders to raise grievances, this can enhance the robustness of a company’s efforts to identify and assess human rights impacts (see sect. II.D below).36 4. Stakeholder reflections on the corporate responsibility to respect human rights 42. Civil society and other stakeholders, including technology companies themselves, referred to a number of continuing challenges and gaps in the implementation of the corporate responsibility to respect human rights in the technology sector. For example, current practices with regard to stakeholder engagement in the context of human rights due diligence are often found to be unsatisfactory for a number of reasons, including that high demands and repeated requests from companies for input from a small number of civil society organizations create engagement fatigue and resource strain on certain groups. A lack of access to affected stakeholders, especially in the global South, where many technology companies tend to lack a direct relationship with groups that may be most at risk, is another challenge.37 While some technology companies have started to publish transparency reports, others, such as surveillance companies, are moving towards less transparency.38 It is due to that mixed level of company performance with regard to transparency reporting and communications that experts have repeatedly called for standardization of transparency reporting.39 Overall, the submissions indicated a lack of detailed public information at present about the way that technology companies conducted due diligence, making it difficult to assess the effectiveness of their due diligence processes.40 43. In view of the present challenges, publicly available rankings, such as the index by Ranking Digital Rights, which aim to assess the performance of technology companies on digital rights aspects, provide a very useful compass to measure progress, including on corporate governance of human rights. D. Access to remedy (pillar III) 44. The right to an effective remedy for human rights violations is a central tenet of human rights law and is reflected in pillar III of the Guiding Principles, which focuses on access to remedy for victims of business-related human rights harms (guiding principles 25–31).41 This includes harms that may arise from the way technology products and services are developed, implemented and used. States are required to take “appropriate steps to prevent, investigate, punish and redress” business-related human rights abuses within their territory and/or jurisdiction (guiding principle 1) and ensure that those affected “have access to effective remedy” (guiding principle 25). 45. Pillar III refers to three categories of grievance mechanisms: judicial mechanisms, State-based non-judicial mechanisms and non-State-based grievance mechanisms.42 36 37 38 39 40 41 42 See also A/HRC/50/45/Add.1 (forthcoming). See https://www.ohchr.org/sites/default/files/2021-11/strategic-aspects-part-II.pdf. See https://www.ohchr.org/sites/default/files/2022-03/Amnesty-International.pdf#page=6. See https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.1177/0007650317717957. See https://www.ohchr.org/sites/default/files/2022-03/GlobalPartnersDigital-joint-submission-onbehalf-of-a-groupoforganizations.pdf#page=5. See https://www.ohchr.org/sites/default/files/Documents/Issues/Business/B-Tech/access-to-remedyconcepts-and-principles.pdf. The B-Tech Project has collaborated closely with the OHCHR Accountability and Remedy Project. See in particular https://www.ohchr.org/sites/default/files/202203/A2R_in_tech_consultation_report.pdf. 9