Respect human rights

We seek to place rights-holders, those individuals and communities whose rights could be impacted by our operations or business relationships, at the center of all we do. We work to continuously improve our due diligence with respect to identifying and addressing risks and impacts across our value chain and securing our supply of raw materials responsibly. To succeed in this endeavor, we expect our suppliers to commit to respecting human rights within their business and we seek to collaborate with them, either individually or through various multistakeholder initiatives.

Our efforts to respect, promote, and protect human rights underlie many of the activities and programs described throughout this report. A dedicated cross-functional team at our central operations coordinates our approach, which is grounded in the United Nations Guiding Principles on Business and Human Rights (UNGPs) and centered on four pillars:

• A sound policy framework: Our work is governed by PMI’s Human Rights Commitment, which is complemented by other PMI policy instruments such as our company’s Code of Conduct, Responsible Sourcing Principles, Marketing Standards, and Good Agricultural Practices. Awareness-raising and training help us embed those instruments and an ethos of respect for human rights within our corporate culture.
• Rigorous due diligence: We have robust programs and processes in place to identify our adverse impacts across our value chain; these include our enterprise-wide assessment, human rights saliency mappings, and human rights impact assessments (HRIAs), in addition to targeted due diligence programs focused on areas of potential risks such as our tobacco and electronics supply chains. We complement these programs with external assessments and verifications.
• Remediation: We implement measures to address adverse impacts and maximize opportunities to drive positive change for people across our value chain. We seek to collaborate with civil society organizations, governments, and the private sector to design and deploy impactful solutions. Wherever these adverse impacts occur, we strive to ensure affected individuals have access to grievance mechanisms and effective remedy in line with the UNGPs.
• Transparency: A complex and international value chain carries the potential for human rights risks that we need to understand, manage, and continuously address. Reporting transparently on our progress and the challenges we face through our annual reporting and targeted communications is a vital component of our approach.

In 2023, we plan to publish a stand-alone Human Rights Report, detailing our strategy to respect and protect human rights and our progress to date in implementing our Human Rights Commitment, first published in 2017. This inaugural report will lay out our recently updated Human Rights Commitment (issued at the end of 2022), lessons learned, good practices in our ongoing work across our value chain, challenges faced, and future actions.

The updated Human Rights Commitment is already included in our company-wide Business and Human Rights e-learning. In 2022, we made this e-learning available in seven additional languages (Bahasa, German, Japanese, Polish, Portuguese, Russian, and Spanish). This key step aims, as of 2023, to facilitate its accessibility and increase the number of colleagues across our global operations who can learn about human rights and our Commitment.

In 2022, we completed our sixth and seventh assessments since 2018, in Brazil and Malaysia, respectively. We also continued monitoring the implementation of actions recommended by previous HRIAs in Mexico, Mozambique, the Philippines, Russia, and Turkey.

In 2021, we developed and introduced a self-assessment tool, which we piloted to help low- and medium-risk country markets identify salient human rights risks within their organizations, and develop action plans to address them. In 2022, we used the learnings from these pilots to begin fine-tuning our methodology and toolkit. Our aim is to simplify and streamline the process without sacrificing the essential aspects and nuances that contribute to effective assessments. Our refined approach will include targeted training and new pilots.