About this guide

What is the Human Rights Guide to the SDGs?

This Guide illustrates the human rights anchorage of the 17 Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) by making concrete links between the 169 targets and the relevant range of:

  • International and regional human rights instruments
  • International labour standards
  • Key environmental instruments - some of which have human rights dimensions

How to use the Guide?

The Guide is the essential tool to:

  • Understand the linkages between the SDGs and human rights, labour standards and environmental treaties and instruments
  • Develop a human rights-based approach to sustainable development programming, implementation, monitoring, evaluation and reporting
  • Understand the linkages between regional and international human rights instruments and environmental treaties

Step one

Step two

Step three

SELECT

  • SDG goals
  • SDG targets
  • Human rights conventions or articles
  • ILO conventions or recommendations
  • ... or free text search

 

GET

…a precise list of matches between goals, targets, specific human rights instrument, ILO conventions and rights-holders.

Now, the list can help you explore additional human rights resources like: state reports, thematic and country specific guidance from monitoring bodies, etc.

BUILD

…your human rights-based approach to the 2030 Agenda and integrate human rights in:

  • Implementation: Reform, strategies, action plans  and programmes,
  • Follow-up and Review: Reports and dialogues; data, baselines and analyses.

Who can use it?

The Guide has useful information for all actors, including States, local authorities, civil society organisations, businesses, National Human Rights Institutions, regional human rights bodies, the UN-System, donors and specific rights-holders such as women, children, persons with disabilities, indigenous peoples and migrant workers. More specifically, the Guide can help to:

  • Support actors and rights holders to identify the human rights as well as labour and environmental standards and principles of relevance to their work
  • Base national, regional and global SDG action plans and implementation strategies on international and regional human rights and labour standards and environmental instruments
  • Guide the identification of additional national, regional and global indicators and promote an inclusive, transparent and participatory approach to implementation and follow-up and review processes at all levels

Limitations

Human rights are indivisible and interdependent. Likewise, labour standards and environmental instruments provide a comprehensive framework that must be applied in a systematic and coherent manner. Therefore, it is important that the linkages shown in this Guide should not lead to a simplistic, narrow or compartmentalised interpretation of human rights or other standards. Rather, this database aims to highlight some of the most immediate human rights, labour and environmental links and implications of the SDGs and targets and thereby intends to serve as a starting point for further in-depth analysis and reflection.

For a more in depth, technical explanation of the methodology behind the database, please click here.