• Water management and use – upcoming meetings in South Africa in partnership with the South African Human Rights Commission will take forward our emerging work in this area. We are also planning convenings on water use in agriculture which will take place in Kenya in early 2011.
• Land appropriation - following our initial convening in India, we are co-organizing with Fundación Ideas para la Paz roundtable events in Colombia in May exploring the role of business and other actors on issues relating to land rights.
• Access to grievance mechanisms and justice – we are collaborating with the Interfaith Center on Corporate Responsibility to examine access to remedies in the context of water and land related issues beginning with a convening in Louisiana, USA later this year.
• Labour migration – in cooperation with IBLF and ETI, we are launching this month a series of multi-stakeholder roundtables to address migrant worker rights in the hospitality sector in relation to the 2012 London Olympics and management of migration and worker protection in manufacturing supply chains in SE Asia.
• Financial sector - we will soon be releasing our initial research on the role of human rights in non-financial risk assessment and will be organizing a series of consultations to discuss our findings.

In each thematic area, IHRB works towards producing policy and practice guidance for business, governments and other relevant actors based on regional and expert convenings as well as commissioned research. Each IHRB thematic track also includes a particular focus on integrating a gender perspective.

• Application of Due Diligence – based on interviews we are conducting with over 25 companies involving their experiences of applying due diligence procedures. Our findings will be released in June during the UN Global Compact Leaders Summit in New York.
• "Green Flags" - as positive steps to accompany the existing "Red Flags" framework for companies operating in high risk zones, we are convening a series of multi-stakeholder meetings to develop practical guidelines for companies operating in areas experiencing widespread human rights abuses.
• UN human rights mechanisms – We are actively engaging key UN processes and experts in their work. For example, IHRB is assisting the UN expert on water as she looks during 2010 at private sector issues. We'll also be making submissions to the UN Human Rights Council’s Universal Periodic Review process in the coming months as a way of engaging governments around their obligations to protect against corporate human rights abuses.

Our most recent event featured a discussion with Irene Khan, former Secretary General of Amnesty International. A podcast of the event is available for download.

We hope you’ll visit our website which is developing as a main source of information on our activities as well as a platform for commentary on key human rights and business issues in the news via a regular series of blogs which are also available by email and via social networking sites.

The Responsible Sourcing Network (a new project of As You Sow) and the Institute for Human Rights and Business, in partnership with Anti-Slavery International and Boston Common Asset Management, will convene a meeting in Brussels to address forced child labour in Uzbekistan’s cotton sector.