A/HRC/44/43 recommendations made by the Working Group, for example that States should use all available levers to address market failures and governance gaps to advance corporate human rights due diligence as part of standard business practice, ensuring alignment with the Guiding Principles, including by using legislation to incentivize due diligence, including through mandatory requirements.89 One issue referenced in the contributions was whether mandatory human rights due diligence laws should include “safe harbours” or other liability defences, for situations in which a business conducts adequate due diligence and, nonetheless, a human rights abuse occurs within its operations. 46. Different jurisdictions address due diligence differently. Examples of national legislation includes the law on the corporate duty of vigilance in France, the Modern Slavery Act in the United Kingdom, and the law on child labour due diligence in the Netherlands. Required approaches range from disclosure of whether due diligence occurs, to the broader French mandate for companies to undertake due diligence and develop “vigilance” plans, similar to compliance programmes.90 Mandatory requirements for human rights due diligence, as a legal duty, introduced at the national or regional level, would force changes in corporate behaviour such that companies would carry out human rights due diligence for their own operations and supply or value chains. This would result in greater legal certainty, more level playing fields, increased leverage within value chains, and better integrated risk management. For these reasons, companies often call for consistent and comprehensive regulations. A survey of multinational companies based in the United Kingdom indicated that businesses would prefer stronger human rights and environmental legislation, mirroring corruption provisions in the Bribery Act of 2010, which made it an offence for a company to fail to prevent bribery.91 As mandatory standards induce greater compliance than voluntary ones, States should enact legislation requiring companies to conduct human rights and anti-corruption due diligence across their supply chains. V. The corporate responsibility to respect human rights 47. Corruption risks in the operations of a business, relating to supply chains, partnerships or operation in States with prevalent corruption, mean that not only is there a risk of bribery occurring, either through a company or its agents or business partners, there is also a heightened risk of human rights abuses. Thus, businesses should be engaged in human rights due diligence alongside anti-corruption assessments. Similarly, a company’s approach to corruption can increase or decrease its likelihood of causing, contributing to or becoming linked to human rights abuses. The UN Guiding Principles Reporting Framework illustrates how companies can explain the links between the two issues. 48. Contributors in the Working Group’s consultation noted that companies could not avoid assessing corruption’s impact on human rights while conducting human rights impact assessments. In places where corruption is rife, companies need to consider human rights and anti-corruption measures as linked, for example, in situations where officials expected bribes to approve inspections, human rights abuses were also likely. In situations of grand corruption, where corruption may be endemic within a State or State institutions, businesses need to engage in enhanced due diligence to prevent corruption, and to identify the heightened risk of human rights abuses, given weak or corrupted political institutions and lack of rights protections. 49. While many companies have implemented anti-corruption compliance programmes to manage risk, responding to criminal laws against bribery and mitigating against sanctions, they have not done so in relation to human rights. This is often because of the absence of regulatory requirements. Anti-corruption compliance is largely a response to civil and criminal liability provisions, for example as contained in the Foreign Corrupt 89 90 91 14 A/73/163, para. 93. See https://vigilance-plan.org/the-law/. See www.biicl.org/publications/a-uk-failure-to-prevent-mechanism-for-corporate-human-rightsharms.