A/HRC/8/16 page 6 14. Influence as a basis for assigning responsibility invites manipulation. This is so because influence can only be defined in relation to someone or something. Thus, it is itself subject to influence. A Government can deliberately fail to perform its duties in the hope or expectation that a company will yield to social pressures to promote or fulfil certain rights, demonstrating why State duties and corporate responsibilities must be defined independently of one another. 15. When the concept of sphere of influence has been operationalized further, it has been through the term proximity: “The ‘sphere of influence’ of a business entity tends to include the individuals to whom it has a certain political, contractual, economic or geographic proximity. Every business entity, whatever its size, will have a sphere of influence; the larger it is, the larger the sphere of influence is likely to be.”9 But the precise meaning of proximity remains unclear. What constitutes “political proximity”, for example? The most intuitive meaning of proximity geographic - can be misleading. Clearly, companies need to be concerned with their impact on workers and surrounding communities, but their activities can equally affect the rights of people far away from the source, as, for example, violations of privacy rights by Internet service providers can endanger dispersed end-users. Hence, it is not proximity that determines whether or not a human rights impact falls within the responsibility to respect, but rather the company’s web of activities and relationships. 16. To discharge the mandate requirement to “clarify” the concept of sphere of influence and its implications, the Special Representative has explored the possibility of redefining corporate “influence” in terms of “control” or “causation”. However, those concepts, in turn, may be too restrictive for companies that seek to not only respect rights but also to voluntarily “support” them, as, for example, in the context of the Global Compact. 17. Furthermore, the concepts of control or causation could wrongly limit the baseline responsibility of companies to respect rights. The responsibility to respect requires that companies exercise due diligence to identify, prevent and address adverse human rights impacts related to their activities. If the scope of due diligence were defined by control and causation this could imply, for example, that companies were not required to consider the human rights impacts of suppliers they do not legally control, or situations where their own actions might not directly cause harm but indirectly contribute to abuse. 18. These considerations have led the Special Representative to conclude that, while sphere of influence remains a useful metaphor for companies to think broadly about their human rights responsibilities and opportunities beyond the workplace, it is of limited utility in clarifying the specific parameters of their responsibility to respect human rights. C. The scope of due diligence 19. If companies are to exercise human rights due diligence, what is its scope? The process inevitably will be inductive and fact-based, but the principles guiding it can be stated succinctly. 9 “Report of the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights on the Responsibilities of Transnational Corporations and Related Business Enterprises” (E/CN.4/2005/91).