What Happens When a Giant Energy Company Prioritizes Human Rights?
Caurine Coudeville, Vice President of Human Rights at TotalEnergies, explains how the company is embedding the United Nations Guiding Principles on Business and Human Rights into its operations — ensuring that respect for people is built into every decision.Coudeville outlines how French law requires companies to identify and address their most critical human rights issues and shares how TotalEnergies has identified six key priorities, including community impact, discrimination, and the responsible use of security forces.
She also highlights the company’s commitment to giving stakeholders a voice — from the earliest stages of a project through completion — through dialogue, consultation, and grievance mechanisms.
Key Takeaways:
The United Nations Guiding Principles on Business and Human Rights are a set of rules that businesses must have embedded in their processes.
French law requires businesses to identify their most salient human rights issues and address them
TotalEnergies has identified six crucial human rights issues across the company, including local communities and discrimination.
TotalEnergies gives impacted stakeholders a voice in projects through presentations and grievance mechanisms.
Timestamps:
00:19 - The United Nations Guiding Principles on Business and Human Rights
00:40 - French law regarding human rights
03:07 - How to identify and prioritize important human rights issues
04:12 - TotalEnergies’ six salient human rights issues
06:24 - How TotalEnergies gives impacted stakeholders a voice
07:35 - Grievance mechanisms defined
Filmed at the 2025 Shift Business Workshop hosted by Shift and Harvard Business School’s Institute for Business in Global Society (BiGS), which focused on examining inequality as a systemic issue.
Learn more about BiGS research related to the economic impact of inequality:
https://www.hbs.edu/bigs/caroline-rees-balancing-the-books-and-human-rights
The Shift project: https://shiftproject.org/ Receive SMS online on sms24.me
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