Social Sustainability and Human Rights: A Bulwark Against DEI Rollbacks
Social Sustainability and Human Rights: A Bulwark Against DEI Rollbacks
by Nawel Bailey Rojkjaer
In a period of sharp political volatility—and a visible rollback of hard-won human rights and DEI commitments, including attacks on women, LGBTQ+ persons, and racialized and Indigenous communities—businesses are receiving conflicting signals about the legitimacy of inclusion efforts. While some states retreat, others continue to strengthen protections, and many companies have maintained or even expanded their DEI practices despite mounting pressure. Research highlighted by business coalitions such as Open for Business reinforces decades of evidence showing that inclusive companies outperform their peers, experience lower operational risk, and attract greater investment. In this context, the UN Guiding Principles on Business and Human Rights —and the mandatory human rights due diligence laws grounded in them—serve as a critical safeguard against politically motivated DEI rollbacks, embedding equality and non-discrimination into corporate governance systems that endure beyond shifts in political climate.
Human Rights: Duty to Protect vs. Obligation to Respect
Human rights are inherent to all persons, covering civil, political, economic, social, and cultural rights—from freedom from torture and the freedom of expression, to the rights to education, work under just conditions, and privacy. Rooted in the belief in human dignity, the modern framework took form with the 1948 Universal Declaration of Human Rights, and was later complemented by the International Covenants on Civil and Political Rights and on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights. Together, these instruments constitute the International Bill of Human Rights. While states bear the primary duty to protect and fulfill these rights, international law also recognizes that corporations can adversely affect their implementation, prompting the UNGPs to set out the authoritative standard for how businesses should respect human rights.
The UNGPs Establish the Minimum Standard for Business
Adopted in 2011, the UN Guiding Principles on Business and Human Rights (UNGPs) establish the globally accepted framework clarifying that businesses, independently of states, have a responsibility to respect human rights. Under Pillar I, states bear the duty to protect, respect, and fulfill human rights by preventing abuse by third parties, regulating and enforcing laws, and taking positive measures to ensure the enjoyment of rights. Pillar II, by contrast, articulates the corporate responsibility to respect human rights: businesses must avoid causing or contributing to harm and address adverse impacts with which they are involved, without assuming the state’s role in guaranteeing rights. To meet this responsibility, companies are expected to adopt a human rights policy, conduct due diligence to identify and address adverse impacts, and enable or contribute to remedies when harm occurs. This framework has become the foundation for emerging national and regional laws that formalize and operationalize corporate human rights responsibilities.
National and Regional Frameworks for Business and Human Rights
The European Union has taken a significant step forward in expanding human rights due diligence obligations. The Corporate Sustainability Due Diligence Directive (CSDDD) and the Corporate Sustainability Reporting Directive (CSRD) require companies to identify, prevent, mitigate, and report on adverse human rights and environmental impacts across their value chains (European Commission). These measures reflect growing investor expectations and rising reputational and legal risks associated with insufficient oversight of supply chains and business relationships (Investor Alliance for Human Rights).
Many jurisdictions have also developed HRDD frameworks, with more emerging. Norway and Switzerland have enacted human rights due diligence laws; Korea reintroduced its Corporate Human Rights and Environmental Due Diligence Act to the National Assembly in 2025; and Canada adopted forced and child labour reporting legislation in 2023. The United States enforces prohibitions on imports produced with forced labour under 19 U.S.C. § 1307. In addition, nearly thirty countries have adopted or are drafting National Action Plans on Business and Human Rights. Collectively, these initiatives signal an accelerating global shift toward mandatory human rights management and disclosure, reinforcing that companies must integrate human rights considerations into their core operations—not as voluntary commitments but as legal expectations.
DEI’s Human-Rights Foundation
The growing legal entrenchment of human rights due diligence has not occurred in a political vacuum; instead, it has coincided with intensifying resistance in some contexts, most notably in the United States, where corporate DEI and human rights commitments are facing organized pushback. DEI policies emerged in the United States in the 1950s–60s alongside the civil rights movement, aiming to expand equal opportunity and dismantle discriminatory systems in education and employment. Illegal discrimination, which is to say, differential treatment that is prohibited by law because it is based on protected characteristics (such as race, sex, religion, disability, age, or sexual orientation) and lacks a lawful justification, is, by definition, incompatible with human rights. Legal discrimination, by contrast, refers to differential treatment that the law permits or requires, either because it serves a legitimate aim and is proportionate (for example, age limits for certain safety-critical jobs), or because it is expressly allowed to remedy disadvantage (such as affirmative action or reasonable accommodations). Yet in parts of the United States, oppositional discourse now frames the protection of DEI measures themselves as a form of “discrimination,” thereby inverting and ignoring the very purpose of equality protections. DEI initiatives were designed to remedy the enduring effects of historical exclusion and to foster the diversity necessary for all people to participate fully and equally in society. While political pressure may prompt some companies to scale back or rebrand these initiatives, such decisions do not eliminate their underlying responsibilities under human rights law.
DEI initiatives advance social sustainability by reducing structural and interpersonal discrimination conditions that directly undermine human rights. Yet, respecting human rights requires attention to the full spectrum of ways companies affect people’s dignity, well-being, and equal participation. As such, social sustainability and mandatory due diligence laws operate as stabilizing mechanisms: they safeguard human rights commitments from fluctuating political attitudes toward DEI and ensure that non-discrimination obligations cannot be abandoned for political expediency.
Because these laws apply to large companies operating or selling in covered jurisdictions—including, for the time being, many U.S. firms—corporate actors cannot simply suspend DEI measures without addressing the resulting human rights implications. Human rights due diligence requires companies to identify, prevent, mitigate, and account for adverse impacts on people across their activities and value chains. The legal and governance obligations embedded in UNGP-aligned frameworks thus provide companies with both the foundation and the tools to maintain inclusive practices even when the political environment becomes hostile.
But this dynamic is being tested. The United States government, together with industry lobbyists, has recently intensified efforts to suppress DEI—not only at home, but through international economic diplomacy. In 2025, the U.S. Secretary of Energy joined Qatar’s Minister of State for Energy Affairs in a letter urging the EU to repeal or significantly water down key provisions of the CSDDD, warning that the directive could disrupt trade and energy supplies. A coalition of U.S. State Attorneys General has similarly urged American multinationals—including major tech firms—to defy the EU’s new sustainability reporting and due diligence requirements. This opposition reflects a combination of stated economic concerns about extraterritorial regulatory reach and compliance costs, as well as broader domestic political resistance in the United States to ESG- and human-rights-based regulation.
Meanwhile, the EU itself has reconsidered aspects of its due diligence regime, ostensibly in the name of promoting European competitiveness. Under the EU Commission’s “Omnibus”, policymakers have raised the employee and turnover thresholds for CSDDD applicability, which dramatically narrow the companies and businesses in the value chain that remain subject to obligations. Subject to revision at a future date, these developments create real uncertainty for companies about the future reach and enforceability of human rights due diligence.
Yet, even as the EU has undertaken modifications to the mandatory due diligence regime, the obligation for companies to conduct due diligence remains structurally embedded. The EU Directives rest on the normative and operational foundations laid by the UNGPs, and they continue to inform a rapidly expanding global patchwork of laws, investor due diligence expectations, and market standards. For U.S. flagship firms—especially those operating or selling in Europe—the language, visibility, or scope of DEI efforts may be recalibrated, but the underlying obligation to assess and address discrimination as a human rights impact remains inescapable. The due diligence obligation persists—not only as a matter of compliance with binding law in jurisdictions that have adopted mandatory due diligence regimes, but also as a normative and market-based expectation grounded in international standards and investor stewardship practices—serving as a bulwark against domestic and geopolitical efforts to erode protections for equality and inclusion.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Nawel Bailey Rojkjaer is a Senior Sustainability Consultant at GLOBAL CSR in Copenhagen and a researcher specializing in heightened Human Rights Due Diligence (hHRDD) for companies and investors operating in conflict-affected areas. She is a lawyer with degrees in both law and political science from McGill University, and has extensive experience advising global companies on business & human rights, responsible investment, and social sustainability. Her work focuses on operationalizing the UN Guiding Principles on Business and Human Rights and related international standards within corporate practice. Nawel’s research and advisory work is driven by a commitment to translating human rights standards into effective, scalable, and credible implementation.