Advancing Human Rights

Our efforts are anchored in policies that apply across our business. We regularly review our policies to identify areas for updates and improvements. We also engage external stakeholders and conduct benchmarking against international human rights standards and evolving industry norms.

Our Global Human Rights Principles demonstrate our commitment to respecting human rights and the dignity of people connected to our business around the world.

Our Supply Chain Standards apply to all suppliers of goods and services for Amazon and Amazon’s subsidiaries, including service providers, vendors, selling partners, contractors, and subcontractors (collectively, “suppliers”). They are grounded in principles of inclusivity, continuous improvement, and supply chain accountability. We engage with suppliers that are committed to these same principles and suppliers commit to these standards as a condition of doing business with us. We update these standards at least every three years, working with external stakeholders to align requirements with current best practices and regulatory standards.

We’re committed to embedding human rights considerations into decision-making across our company and into our policy and governance framework. While Amazon’s Board of Directors has overall responsibility for risk oversight of the company, the Board has delegated responsibility for certain risks to its committees.

The Nominating and Corporate Governance Committee oversees the management of risks related to our environmental, sustainability, and corporate social responsibility practices, including those related to human rights. The committee regularly meets with management to review these matters. Learn more about our committees on Management and Governance.

As a global company, we recognize the responsibility and opportunity we have to raise awareness among our employees on human rights issues. We have a central team that works across the company to conduct human rights due diligence and embed human rights considerations into everyday business decisions.

We also offer trainings tailored to salient human rights risks. For example, our forced labor awareness program makes ongoing training available to employees around the world to help them recognize indicators of forced labor and report concerns to appropriate authorities in a way that puts the interests of potential victims first.

We’re committed to assessing, prioritizing, and addressing adverse human rights impacts connected to our business, and are continually working to improve our approach. At Amazon, businesses deploy a variety of mechanisms to do this.

In our supply chain, we assess and respond to risk by leveraging internal and external data and guidance from external stakeholders, including industry experts, civil society groups, and nongovernmental organizations. We engage directly with suppliers and their workers, and conduct independent audits to verify compliance with our Supply Chain Standards. We work with suppliers on appropriate remediation measures and offer partnerships and programs to help them address risks and invest in worker well-being.

We recognize that audits alone are insufficient to drive long-term change across industries. Like many companies in similar industries, we are exploring new ways to encourage improvement in worker protections. These include supporting suppliers’ efforts to improve their grievance mechanisms, supplier capacity-building programs, worker trainings, and collaborations with other brands and civil society. We currently focus our supply chain efforts on key commitment areas: Safe Workplaces, Responsible Recruitment and Freely Chosen Employment, Gender Equity, Fair Wages, Environmental Protection, and Access to Effective Grievance Mechanisms. Learn more about our Supply Chain Commitments.

Within our own operations, we have a central team that works across the company to conduct human rights due diligence and embed human rights considerations into everyday business decisions. With support from this team, Amazon businesses work towards integrating our human rights principles into their operations and business relationships by conducting human rights risk assessments and remedying identified issues.

In line with the UNGPs, identifying and prioritizing the most salient risks connected to Amazon operations and business relationships is central to our human rights due diligence practices. As we continue to improve and expand our human rights due diligence practices, we will leverage human rights impact assessments (HRIAs) to assess and address risks connected to our operations and business relationships. HRIAs help us understand causes of systemic issues, enhance ongoing engagement with critical stakeholders, and facilitate increasingly transparent disclosures.

We’re committed to driving best practices in human rights due diligence through increased disclosures about our approach and by expanding our stakeholder engagement. Each year, we track progress on our human rights commitments and publicly share up-to-date information about our programs, including external partnerships with organizations that share our core human rights values.

Engagement with external stakeholders is key to our human rights due diligence approach. This collaboration is essential to identifying positive outcomes for people connected to our business and is part of our responsibility to respect human rights in line with the UNGPs. We rely on experts and affected rights-holders to inform our approach and validate that our efforts have the impact we intend. Through regular stakeholder engagement and strategic partnerships, we incorporate invaluable expert input into our work, helping us achieve greater impact on people connected to our business around the world.

As part of our first enterprise-wide human rights saliency assessment, we made a foundational commitment to ensure that those in our value chain have the opportunity for concerns to be heard and issues to be resolved. Focusing on listening to the people connected to our business and understanding their experiences to address risks and remedy issues is a critical element of our human rights approach and a core obligation under the UNGPs.

Consistent, honest, and open communication with our employees allows us to continually improve our workplace experience, empowering individuals to voice concerns and have them directly addressed by leadership. Our goal is to hear from and listen to everyone. Dedicated teams across the company focus on establishing open communication with our employees, providing them with meaningful grievance mechanisms and avenues for dialogue with leadership. We have many policies, practices, and mechanisms in place to provide open lines of communication between leadership and employees, and act regularly to address employee concerns and make improvements. Aligning with the UNGP Reporting Framework, Amazon’s policies and practices are designed to promote respect for the rights of freedom of association and collective bargaining and to comply with the legal requirements of the countries where we operate.

Our aim is that every worker across our supply chain has access to an effective grievance mechanism. We work with suppliers to increase their capacity to develop these mechanisms by creating channels to hear directly from workers about their experiences and to support the resolution of issues from workers’ perspectives.