Amnesty International's Modern Slavery Act Transparency Statement
Around the world millions of people are victims of modern slavery. The complexity of today’s global supply chains means that consumers are often unknowingly contributing to the exploitation of others. Modern slavery is therefore an urgent challenge, which is why Amnesty International worked to help bring about the transparency in supply chain provisions under the UK Modern Slavery Act 2015. The Act requires organizations doing business in the UK with a total turnover of £36m or more to report on the steps that they are taking to ensure that modern slavery is not taking place in their global supply chains.
This is a statement made by Amnesty International’s International Secretariat on its own compliance with the requirements of section 54 of the Act. It sets out steps that Amnesty International’s International Secretariat has taken to ensure that modern slavery is not taking place in our supply chains and any part of our own business. The statement follows the framework prescribed by the CORE coalition of NGOs to which Amnesty International contributed, as well as covering all the areas set out at section 54(5) of the Act
Our key findings are as follows:
- As we identified in our 2016 statement our suppliers consist predominately of professional consultancies and service providers to support both our substantive human rights work and the operations which support that work. These services are provided almost exclusively by way of direct service provision without extensive supply chains. As such we consider that the modern slavery risks arising out of our operations are generally low.
- In our last statement we identified higher risk suppliers which required further investigation. Some investigations were completed but our main focus has been on updating our wider procurement policy and processes.
- Last year we recognised that our internal working practices represent a large potential risk area due to the fact that our staff carry out the majority of our work. As a result, this year we completed a full review of our people management policies and processes. This concluded that we were managing associated risks effectively but recommended updates to be made to a number of policies.
- As part of our updated approach to ethical procurement, we developed and issued a questionnaire to suppliers to ensure that those who fulfil the criteria to report under section 54(5) of the Modern Slavery Act are doing so and have undertaken proper due diligence.
- We consider that our updated ethical procurement policies and processes represent a strong basis to manage risks associated with modern slavery however we recognise that further improvements are needed. In 2018 we will further develop our approach by taking the following steps:
- implement our updated procurement policy consistently across all the International Secretariat’s global offices, with a focus on raising staff awareness on ethical procurement issues including on modern slavery;
- implement a more targeted approach to investigating suppliers in high risk areas;
- review the responses to our supplier questionnaires and consider whether updates to the questionnaire and/or our wider approach are needed; and
- complete two outstanding actions identified in 2016:
- the development of key performance indicators; and
- the review of our internal grant procedures.