Human Rights Impact Assessments

Our commitment

As part of our human rights due diligence approach, we are committed to conducting and publishing three human rights impact assessments (HRIAs) every year until 2025 across the Lidl Group, in line with internationally recognised methodologies.

These allow us to gain detailed information about the systemic challenges facing workers – for example, in relation to gender discrimination, land rights or freedom of association. We then implement action plans based on our findings.

Our Approach

We select supply chains for our HRIAs following detailed risk assessments, and where we have leverage to move towards lasting change.

Furthermore, our HRIAs follow a systematic process to identify, prioritise, and address the impact of business operations on human rights issues. This includes:

Mapping out relevant business activities, processes, and value chain relationships.
Conducting desk-based research focusing on risks to vulnerable workers, to support a future field visit.
Directly engaging with workers within the scope of the HRIA as well as seeking the opinion of trade unions, civil society organisations, multi-stakeholder initiatives and non-governmental organisations (NGOs).
Conducting a field visit to explore and validate the issues identified in the desk-based research.
Publishing and implementing a time-bound action plan to ensure that negative human rights impacts identified throughout the process are mitigated effectively.

Our first ever HRIA was conducted in our Kenyan tea supply chain in 2020. Since then, we have conducted and published assessments in our Spanish berries, Colombian bananas, Italian canned tomatoes, Indian shrimp, and South African wine supply chains - read more below.