Making Human Rights Training Accessible: The IPIECA Human Rights Training Toolkit for the Oil and Gas Industry

Abstract

Abstract The oil and gas industry operates in some of the most challenging places in the world and faces complex human rights related issues both at home and abroad. These issues include dealing with local conflict, corruption, indigenous rights, labour rights and managing relationships with governments and a range of external stakeholders. In 2006, the International Petroleum Industry Conservation Association (IPIECA) produced the Human Rights Training Toolkit, a collaborative effort by members of the Social Responsibility Working Group in sharing expertise and practices to develop an industry-wide training template. It was created to promote human rights awareness within the petroleum industry, focusing on awareness and education, identification of risks and opportunities, and practical actions related to implementation. The training template is comprised of a presentation, workbook, trainer's manual and a resource guide. This paper will describe the content of the training materials and initial learnings gained by individual companies who have begun integrating the Toolkit into their human rights awareness activities. The Toolkit draws on existing public materials where possible and includes an overview of core international human rights treaties and instruments, a discussion on the role of business, as well as an overview of the "stakeholder" concept. The Toolkit is accessible to the public free of charge at the IPIECA website www.ipieca.org in both English and French. The Toolkit will also be available in Spanish from 2008. The target audience for the Toolkit is company business managers that have requested assistance to better understand human rights issues in their operations, raise awareness in their workforce, anticipate human rights issues and manage them effectively. A preliminary survey of companies using the Toolkit has generated positive feedback. The main strength of the Toolkit is its versatility and companies' ability to customize the Toolkit template to include their own human rights policies and regional or operation-specific materials. The Toolkit is being used by many companies to complement human rights training sessions, and the global audience ranges from security personnel, Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) managers and newly-appointed Directors to human resources staff and employees in high-risk countries.