In recent years, public procurement has increasingly been recognised as a means for states to fulfil their human rights obligations and as a means of realising sustainable development. Including requirements within public procurement that suppliers respect human rights can help prevent human rights abuses including modern slavery, child labour, human trafficking, and excessive working hours from occurring within state value chains and promote the rights of persons with disabilities, women and children, and economically disadvantaged minorities, for example.

This toolkit is designed to be a practical tool with a range good practice examples. It is structured as follows:

The introduction addresses why we are talking about human rights in the context of public procurement.

Chapter B is primarily designed for public procurement planners and policy makers and

• Explains the legal basis for states to include requirements within public procurement that actual and potential suppliers respect human rights;
• Explains how to frame human rights as a policy objective;
• Identifies what system-wide planning is necessary to include requirements that actual and potential suppliers respect human rights.

Chapter C is primarily designed for public procurers and contract managers undertaking procurement exercises and:

• Explains how requirements that suppliers respect human rights can be included at each stage of the procurement process and provide examples of how this has been done in practice;
• Highlights the advantages and limitations of including requirements that suppliers respect human rights at the different stages of the procurement process.

Chapters B and C can be read independently of each other. Therefore, if you are interested in practical ways to incorporate human rights in to procurement exercises, you could move straight from the Introduction to Chapter C.

GRAPHIC: The relationship between human rights and public procurement.