What is Human Rights Impact Assessment?

Human rights impact assessment (HRIA) aims to determine the impact of policies, programmes and projects on human rights, and is intended to help prevent violations of human rights. Before being recognised as a seperate field of activity, human rights impact assessment was considered as part of social impact assessment, but in recent times various actors have started to use it independently. The EU, for example, has attempted to measure the human rights impact of its external relations policy,  primarily to approve the allocation of funding for development programmes. Aid agencies have also showed an interest in using HRIAs to evaluate the human rights impact of their activities, and they have also been developed to evaluate the impact on human rights of trade agreements and business related activities.

With regard to states, HRIAs are still in their infancy and it often falls to civil society organisations to conduct the assessments of their policies and programmes. Nonetheless assessing the human rights impact of policies is a state obligation under international human rights law.