Report for the Calendar Year 2014

A founding member of the Voluntary Principles, FFP is strongly committed to continuing its support of the Voluntary Principles on Security & Human Rights (VPs).

We publicly endorse the VPs on our website and undertake efforts to raise public awareness of their existence as well as to support information sharing between those involved regarding implementation. We greatly welcome feedback from other participants as to how we could more strongly support the VPs going forward.

The extractive industry has been a focus of the FFP’s Human Rights & Business Roundtable because extractive companies are more likely to operate in conflict sensitive environments and need support to understand the conflict issues and ensure that their operations do not exacerbate the risk of conflict. Sessions of the Human Rights & Business Roundtable frequently focus on key aspects of the VPs and each staff member is familiar at different levels with the VPs. All FFP staff are invited to the Roundtable to encourage greater understanding of the issues.

As in previous years, key staff learned more about the implementation of the VPs as FFP undertook conflict and human rights assessments for companies and worked on projects to develop training tools. We currently have three staff members with deeper understanding of the VPs, who are also working on various projects – both national-level implementation work and corporate and project-level work with corporations.

During 2014, FFP continued to pursue multiple activities related to the promotion and implementation of the Voluntary Principles. These activities included:

• Key aspects of the VPs, such as security & human rights and risk assessments, are the focus of dedicated Human Rights & Business Roundtable discussions.
• Continued to develop and deliver training programs on the VPs.
• Continued to represent the NGO Pillar on VPs Steering Committee.
• Developed Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) to measure FFP’s commitment to the VPs.
• Took the lead in drafting the NGO Roles & Responsibilities Document and the NGO Verification Framework.