| Our focus this month is human rights – a topic so broad that businesses can have difficulty deciding what it really means, are unsure what to do, or where to put it on the ubiquitous materiality maps that underpin many strategies and reports. Help is at hand. Our guest contributor rightly starts with foundational principles, notably the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, adopted in 1948 by all nations of the world, setting out in 30 short articles the rights every human is entitled to. Fast forward to 2011, the UN made clear the responsibilities of business through the ‘Ruggie Guiding Principles’, with explicit duties to protect, respect and remedy. Our other writers pick up the story, noting that governments are now going further with their own legislation, most notably the European Commission’s proposed Corporate Sustainability Due Diligence Directive, requiring companies to show what they are doing to protect the environment and human rights. We highlight the action all companies should be taking in both core operations and through partners, and not just those with risky extended supply chains. We look at how environmental rights overlap with human rights, with legal peril coming from climate legislation as well. And our ‘long read’ delves into the implications – good and bad – of artificial intelligence techniques for the human rights agenda. If there is a common theme to the actions our contributors recommend, it is to get ahead of the legislative and regulatory pressures: understand the scope, map the impacts across the whole value chain, and then determine your own guiding principles. In all this, listening to stakeholders is key because, yes, the scope of what is a human right is broad and the implications are changing. As regular readers will know, there's concern about a compliance mindset creeping into management, exacerbated here by uncertainty around potential penalties from breaching the new legislation. Mike Tuffrey | 