They provide a global standard for preventing and addressing adverse human rights impacts associated with business activity.
Under the UNGPs, law firms, as businesses, must also avoid causing or contributing to adverse human rights impacts.
"The severity and scope of human rights impacts of business activity in Burma vary by sector and location.
Aviva's Herron said if the project goes ahead, it "could have significant negative local and global environmental and human rights impacts".
No one should underestimate the adverse human rights impacts of free trade and investment agreements on human rights, development and democratic governance.
This entails businesses knowing what their potentially adverse human rights impacts are and showing, via public disclosure, how they are addressing them, in addition to providing grievance mechanisms.
Disgracefully, it also routinely opposes the call of developing countries to hold corporations to account for their human rights impacts at the UN".
And states have a responsibility to ensure compliance by requiring companies to put in place strong due diligence procedures and to publicly report on the human rights impacts of companies' actions.
Tandre said the UN principles helped Telenor to put in robust systems to monitor its human rights impacts after its own wake-up call in 2008, when allegations of illegal internet telephony services, violations of environmental law, and child workers surfaced at Grameen Telecom, Telenor's subsidiary in Bangladesh.
The Guiding Principles state that businesses now have an explicit responsibility to respect human rights throughout their supply chain and should "seek to prevent or mitigate adverse human rights impacts that are directly linked to their operations, products or services by their business relationships, even if they have not contributed to those impacts".
