Our Top 10 Predicted Business and Human Rights Issues for 2025

Even for the unpredictable world of business and human rights, 2024 was particularly volatile, including for sustainability more generally. The European Union’s (EU) Corporate Sustainability Due Diligence Directive (CSDDD) was poised for adoption, hit a snag, then finalized mid-year. The EU’s Corporate Sustainability Reporting Directive (CSRD) has led to double materiality assessments the world over, as companies are determining impacts, risks and opportunities and their significance from dual perspectives. The EU postponed its Deforestation Regulation (EUDR) for a year following widespread confusion and growing concern about compliance and implementation. Companies started reporting voluntarily under the Taskforce on Nature-related Financial Disclosures, and similar additional issue-specific reporting frameworks have been announced. The year of the election, where voters in countries representing 41% of the world’s population went to the polls, led to a change in the U.S. and many other markets. New laws came online, others were adopted, others were adjusted, others stalled and others face court challenge. Human rights are increasingly entrenched for companies as a business imperative, integrated into management systems and compliance programs at a pace accelerated by regulatory regimes with global impacts. All of this creates an embarrassment of riches, even more than 2021, 2022, 2023 or last year, as we perform our annual ritual of identifying 10 key business and human rights and sustainability issues for the upcoming year. Frankly, we could make a top 20 list and still face difficult decisions. But inspired by Human Rights Day, our top 10 business and human rights and sustainability topics for 2025 are below, in no particular order.

1. Trump II

   The second Trump Administration likely means a return to business, human rights and sustainability policies from 2020. Limited major business and human rights-focused laws were passed in the last four years. Of those, the Uyghur Forced Labor Prevention Act, proposed during Trump I to exclude the importation of goods connected to the Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region of China, will still be enforced vigorously. Other longstanding bipartisan laws, such as the Trafficking Victims Protection Reauthorization Act, are unlikely to change. Repealing the climate-focused Inflation Reduction Act is not likely, but funding for some of its programs may wane.

   However, many recent federal government initiatives were accomplished through executive orders, regulation and agency enforcement priorities, which are relatively easy to reverse. These include: the SEC’s climate, fund naming and ESG disclosure rules, and efforts to curb corporate greenwashing; measures to reduce or eliminate vehicle emissions; workers’ rights, including a comprehensive 2023 memorandum designed to strengthen labor protections for workers around the world; the Department of Labor’s uptick in child labor investigations; integrating human rights into arms transfers and weaponry development; mandatory due diligence associated with export license applications; the extensive use of Global Magnitsky Sanctions related to Russia; and a suite of AI and human rights initiatives, including a five principle Blueprint for an AI Bill of Rights, and an executive order establishing new standards for AI safety and security. Some non-legislative initiatives may continue unabated, such as combatting human trafficking. In other areas, like certain aspects of religious freedom, or issues where human rights and political policies converge, there may be enhancements in some respects. And we can expect recent state-based anti-ESG (including anti-DEI) initiatives to migrate to Washington. On a macro level, watch for reduced U.S. bilateral and multilateral engagement to tackle human rights issues, such as the U.N. Treaty. With the old administration returning to D.C., there will be business and human rights shifts when the calendar turns.

2. U.S. States

   Applying Newton’s third law of motion to business and human rights, expect California, New York and other likeminded states to pursue strategies countering federal efforts. Over the past year, California, with the world’s fifth largest economy, adopted a Climate Accountability Package addressing climate and voluntary carbon market disclosures, the Voluntary Carbon Market Disclosure Act addressing corporate greenwashing and a new disclosure law focusing on child labor‑related social compliance audits. It has filed multiple climate-related lawsuits, pursued a highly expansive privacy agenda, became a “sanctuary state” for immigrants, adopted an executive order directing state agencies and departments to embed equity analysis and considerations in their activities and established a Race Equity Commission. The state has long promulgated new human rights and sustainability rules, even before its 2010 Supply Chain Transparency Act, the progenitor for modern slavery acts in the U.K. and Australia (and now Canada), which in turn led to the mandatory human rights due diligence laws recently issued in the EU and Europe. After the November 5 presidential election, California is planning a special legislative session to “safeguard California values and fundamental rights.”

   New York, with an economy that ranks as the world’s 10^th largest, is not far behind. One leading state initiative is the proposed Fashion Act, which would impose broad supply chain human rights and environmental due diligence and disclosure obligations on fashion retail sellers and manufacturers. New York state and City have filed their own climate-related lawsuits. The state has pursued DEI goals, adopted an executive order making it a “sanctuary state” for immigrants and is considering new privacy protections. New York and many other states are considering the federal election implications and will take active business and human rights and sustainability steps next year.

3. Conflict-Affected and High-Risk Areas

   Complications continue to escalate for companies that operate in or do business with entities connected to conflict-affected areas. There are some 110 armed conflicts around the globe, with more state-based conflicts than any time since World War II. Ninety-two countries are involved in conflicts outside their borders. Conflicts in Africa doubled over the past 10 years. The past three years were the most violent in the last three decades as measured by conflict‑related deaths, driven by the civil war in Ethiopia’s Tigray region, Russia’s invasion of Ukraine and Gaza-related violence, along with conflicts in Burkina Faso, Myanmar, Nigeria, Somalia, Sudan and Syria. 110 million people are refugees or internally displaced due to violent conflict, with 16 countries hosting more than half-a-million refugees. The U.N. and its organs have increasingly opined on the implications of doing business in some of those territories.

   As conflicts increase in volume and intensity, business complexities likewise grow. There have long been challenges for companies choosing between remaining in conflict-affected areas, and feeling compelled to support a warring side to protect employee safety and company property, and exiting, and forsaking vulnerable local employees or inadvertently fueling conflict with asset sales. More recently, as global sights turn to value chain due diligence, company responsibilities may cover conflict-connected products, services, suppliers and end-users. These include discovering Western microchips in Russian munitions, banks profiting from the Ukraine invasion, arms manufacturers accused of complicity in Gaza or global entities doing business in any form in the West Bank. They encompass French defense systems found in UAE-manufactured armored vehicles present in South Sudan, or European financial institutions lending to companies tied to the country. They encompass banks accused of funding the Myanmar junta weapons trade or fueling arms production more generally. The market is beginning to examine whether private capital funding for defense purposes could be deemed a “sustainable” outcome. Over the next 12 months there will be further calls for companies and capital providers to act regarding their services and the end-use of their capital and products connected to armed conflict, as “involvement” in war means being part of its supply chain.

4. AI & Human Rights Frameworks

   The rapid adoption of AI in government and industry raises complex legal, ethical and human rights questions. AI offers unprecedented opportunities to benefit a range of human rights and meet multiple sustainable development goals, including accelerating access to remedy, countering bias in human decision-making, identifying forced labor indicators and locating poverty pockets with greater precision. The potential for AI to “level up” opportunity to address socio-economic imbalances in society also affords significant potential. Yet AI also creates equally unprecedented human rights risks. AI systems are trained on massive amounts of private and public data, which can create privacy concerns, generate biased outcomes and exacerbate inequalities. AI is used in predictive policing and facial recognition tools to target minority and vulnerable populations, to support inequitable decisions related to loans, accessing healthcare and social assistance and in monitoring and targeting dissidents. Misuse of AI can have detrimental effects on criminal justice, immigration, finance, welfare, healthcare, education and human resources. It can negatively impact an array of human rights, including privacy, non-discrimination, freedom of expression, freedom of peaceful assembly and association and freedom from torture. Risks related to human rights can arise throughout the AI lifecycle.

   To date, advances in AI technology and use have outpaced legislation. That is changing. The EU’s AI Act entered into force this year. In September 2024, the Council of Europe adopted the first multilateral AI treaty. That Framework Convention on Artificial Intelligence and Human Rights takes a technology-neutral approach, and calls on countries to adopt domestic laws for public and private authorities covering (a) fundamental principles, such as transparency and oversight, equality and non-discrimination and privacy and personal data protection, (b) remedies and procedural safeguards and (c) risk and impact management, including assessing the need for a moratorium or ban on certain AI uses. Early signatories include the U.K., EU and U.S., and eight or so other countries and bodies. Many more may follow in 2025.

5. Plastics

   Since 1967, when Benjamin Braddock was presciently advised of the “great future in plastics” in “The Graduate,” plastic production has grown faster than any other man-made material. Every year, 462 million tons of plastic is produced. Approximately 36% is used in packaging. That includes single-use plastic for food and beverage containers, with approximately 85% of single-use products ending up in landfills or as unregulated waste and an estimated nine to 14 million tons of plastic polluting oceans each year. The Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights (OHCHR) calls plastic pollution “a global threat to human rights.” It greatly impacts the right to health, as negative impacts reportedly associated with plastics include cancer, diabetes, heart disease, obesity, respiratory issues, reproductive and hormone problems and asthma. Leaching from plastics creates biodiversity harms, impacting wildlife and ecosystems. Indeed, plastics may contain a mix of more than 16,000 different chemicals; at least 4,200 may be hazardous to human and environmental health.

   Negotiations over a U.N. Plastics Treaty took place in November 2024, and although no final resolution was reached, they will resume next year. The result will be a legally binding global agreement dictating actions and a timeline to mitigate high-risk plastic production and consumption. While its full scope remains unclear, including whether it will include limits on plastic production versus pollution only, the Treaty will be finalized and ratified in 2025 and the future of plastics will begin to change.

6. Policy Coherence & Streamlining in Response to Demand for Deregulation

   Global human rights and sustainability legislation have grown at a dizzying pace. The sparse regulatory landscape of 2015 has been replaced by a worldwide patchwork of domestic and international laws and regimes covering transparency, mandatory due diligence, accountability, imports and exports, public procurement and other areas. Standalone laws target human rights, regulatory schemes incorporate human rights into areas such as sanctions, money laundering and illicit finance, and trade, and broader sustainability laws directly or indirectly impact or reference human rights. Free trade agreements are rife with human rights and sustainability demands. Climate, biodiversity, deforestation, environmental degradation and health and safety are firmly ensconced as human rights considerations. The compendium of laws and rights continues to grow.

   That rapid growth has neither been carefully planned nor coordinated. No country or the EU has an overarching blueprint to address salient human rights issues across sectors and product lifecycles. Laws are proposed and adopted without consideration for measures already on the books or coherent policy objectives. A law may appear to positively address human rights but create negative consequences for human rights in other ways. Overlapping laws also cause confusion, create inefficiencies and bureaucracy and undermine enforcement and compliance efforts. In 2025, attention to policy coherence for human rights and sustainability regulations will come into focus. Existing laws will be consolidated or streamlined. The effort has already begun, as the president of the European Commission announced her focus on the “omnibus” of European sustainability regulation—the CSDDD, CSRD and Sustainable Finance Disclosure Regulation—following the Budapest Declaration to increase EU competitiveness and reduce bureaucracy. More will follow.

7. Risk Assessment Overload

   Related to policy incoherence and streamlining, companies are facing human rights and sustainability risk assessment overload.

   UNGPs-aligned companies have long performed salient risk assessments, an impressionistic exercise contemplating the severity and likelihood of human rights impacts on rights-holders and communities, which generally incorporates industry benchmarking, public reports, material incidents, company-specific disputes and investigations and the perspectives of experts and stakeholders. The CSRD’s double materiality assessment process is more expansive and formalistic, applying prescribed steps and covering broad sustainability impacts, risks and opportunities on people and planet, and financial impacts. The CSDDD also includes a risk assessment process, starting with operations and chain of activity mapping to identify general areas where adverse human rights and environmental impacts are most likely and severe, followed by risk-based in-depth assessments. EUDR-covered companies have their own heady risk assessment process. The EU’s Digital Services Act, conflict minerals regulations and the forthcoming EU Batteries Regulation each contemplate distinct human rights and sustainability risk assessments. German, Norwegian, French and Swiss laws have differing human rights and sustainability risk assessment requirements. The list goes on.

   That’s a whole lot of risk assessing. Many companies must comply with multiple and differing risk assessment regimes. Identifying actual, potential and perceived human rights impacts is a critical first due diligence step, allowing a company to prioritize and address its most salient issues. However, the abundance of overlapping laws with differing requirements threatens to create rote and mechanistic reviews that undermine the UNGP’s North Star: achieving tangible results for affected individuals and communities, and mitigating and preventing negative impacts for rights-holders. Companies are often gold-plating to the highest applicable standard, to head off non-compliance risk. Expect 2025 to bring greater attention to creating efficiencies in risks assessments, in particular. 

8. EU Transpositions

   Companies are headlong into completing double materiality assessments and preparing reports for the EU’s comprehensive CSRD, and beginning efforts to comply with the landmark CSDDD. While the CSRD covers sustainability reporting, the CSDDD requires companies to address potential negative human rights impacts in operations and supply chains. Both are expansive, driving human rights and sustainability into management systems and operations of covered companies, and generating global value chain due diligence.

   However, 2025 will involve significant transposition efforts for both laws. Procedurally, EU Member States must transpose the CSDDD and CSRD into domestic law. The European Commission opened infringement procedures for 17 EU states for missing the July 2024 CSRD transposition deadline. CSRD transpositions to date have included subtle distinctions, such as penalties and reporting dates. The CSDDD’s transposition differences will be greater, as the law by its terms demands limited harmonization. As the CSDDD notes, states might adopt provisions “more stringent” or “more specific” to enhance protections of rights, which may include “remediation of actual adverse impacts,” “carrying out of meaningful engagement with stakeholders” and perhaps most notably “civil liability.” The CSDDD also must address whether and how some human rights, designed to apply to states, are transposable to companies; in some instances, such as freedom of thought and freedom of expression, privacy and the right to health, that is not readily apparent. These transposition decisions will impact compliance and due diligence approaches of “diligencers”—e.g., covered companies—and “diligencees” —e.g., the entities around the world in covered companies’ supply chains.

9. KPIs and Metrics

   The past several years has witnessed extensive—and often confused—discussions about human rights metrics and key performance indicators (KPIs). Metrics are objective, quantifiable measures used to track something. A KPI reflects whether an organization is meeting a particularly important business objective. Other international regulatory compliance areas, such as anti-corruption, have long relied on metrics and KPIs in program management. For human rights, OHCHR, SHIFT and others have identified indicators and tools to assist companies develop targets. There has been limited corporate uptake, at least in public reporting. There also has been limited guidance on creating effective human rights KPIs, which generally entails selecting a specific activity, identifying a measurable goal for it and defining success.

   The CSRD and CSDDD insist that companies use, and for the CSRD to report on, qualitative and quantitative information. The CSDDD tells Members States to ensure that companies identify and assess adverse impacts based on quantitative and qualitative information, and develop qualitative and quantitative indicators in monitoring the adequacy and effectiveness of steps taken to identify, mitigate and prevent negative impacts and improve performance. The CSRD relies extensively on companies reporting metrics and targets in standard and optional disclosures within each topical area, though giving companies leeway to determine the nature, volume and quality of data to disclose. While, to date, disclosures of human rights KPIs and metrics have been lacking, that will soon change.

10. Indigenous and Land-Connected People

    In 2007, the U.N. adopted the Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples, principles to protect culturally distinct groups who share a connection to the land and natural resources where they live. The International Finance Corporation’s Performance Standards, last updated 12 years ago, added further detail. The rights of Indigenous Peoples have been reflected in international agreements, such as the American Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples and the Escazu Agreement, and are referenced in the EUDR, CSRD and CSDDD. Many domestic legal regimes have protections, particularly surrounding land ownership and free prior informed consent.

    The protections are particularly important today. A substantial percentage of the world’s transition metals are located on or near Indigenous Peoples’ lands. However, domestic law, in particular, remains weak. To support raw material extraction, governments are declaring land connected to Indigenous Peoples publicly owned, with limited consultation. Some domestic laws do not recognize collective ownership, or adequately address consultation. Groups are citing lack of consultation regarding carbon credit offsets. Questions have been raised about respect for cultural norms related to these projects. There are questions about whether laws appropriately define tribal or Indigenous Peoples and “time markers” attaching rights to a date when land rights were physically occupied. The rights of Indigenous Peoples and the just transition are inextricably intertwined, making it especially critical to adopt appropriate protections. Attention will increasingly focus on the issue in 2025.

Conclusion

2024 brought great tumult for business and human rights and sustainability. Even more than past years, this year was filled plot twists and unexpected developments. We should all keep our seatbelts fastened for the next 12 months.