Human Rights

Our commitment

We work every day to build a secure digital environment, so that everyone's equal rights are realised. Respect for human rights is fundamental to our responsible business conduct and mission Sustainable future through digitalisation. We want to make a positive impact on society.

We are committed to respecting human rights in accordance with the United Nations Guiding Principles on Business and Human Rights (UNGPs) and the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) Guidelines for Multinational Enterprises throughout our value chain. Our commitment and statement is established through our Human rights policy. We expect same commitment from all our business partners and suppliers across our entire value.

We have been signatories and committed to UN (United Nations) Global Compact since 2015.

We acknowledge that in addition to our positive impacts on human rights, there are human rights risks related with our business operations and in supply chain. We are continuously developing our understanding of these risks and seek ways to improve tools and processes to manage them.

Our approach

In accordance with the Guiding Principles on Business and Human Rights, we aim to undertake human rights due diligence as part of our corporate decision-making process. We consider human rights in our operations, actions, development, joint ventures, and other activities. Our due diligence follows the approach of assess, prevent, remediate and communicate.

Assessment

We do our best in collaborating and engage with regulatory bodies, international human rights organisations, expertise advisors and industry associations to assess the risks and impacts of our operations. We also participate in multistakeholder forums throughout the year to follow with the emerging and relevant human rights issues. We involve our employees and employee representative in regular dialogues and discussion to understand the most material topics.
The continuous dialogue with our internal and external stakeholders enables us to identify and analyse the most important human rights issues throughout our value chain.

Prevention

Elisa Code of Conduct and Human rights Policy establish the foundation and set the expectations for our Human Rights program. Additionally, Elisa’s Code of ethical purchasing, Security Policy, Elisa Data Protection Policy, Ethical Sales principles and other appropriate principles and guidelines together constitute the processes on means how human rights are managed within the operations of Elisa.

We require our employee to complete mandatory Code of Conduct trainings and Security certification trainings and further encourage to complete voluntary Human Rights policy training which jointly covers all the relevant Human Rights issues. Additionally, we provide trainings and instruction for our employees for onboarding suppliers and customers.

Elisa is a member in industry level Joint Audit Cooperation, and we conduct audits for our suppliers in accordance with JAC’s jointly specified criteria which includes Human rights topics.

We have established ethical sales procedure to protect privacy and ensure that our technologies are not misused.

We work hard to improve our way of working to prevent the human rights violations across our value chain.

Communication

We transparently communicate and share our performance on the human rights issues on our annual report and other regular publications. We also have internal intranet and other channels where we address and raise awareness about the human rights topics with our employees.

Notification channels

Our grievance channel is established to ensure that any individuals and groups impacted are able to present their concerns and grievances about misconduct concerning Elisa Code of Conduct and further that these are processed in an appropriate manner. The notification can be made either directly in person or online. For example, Elisa’s employee can report any misconduct or violation of human rights by contacting directly to their supervisor, HR, corporate responsibility, legal, or internal audit.

Any partners or stakeholder groups can report misconduct and violation of human rights anonymously through Elisa's Whistleblowing Channel.

All reports are processed strictly confidentially according to Elisa’s processes.

Elisa Whistleblowing

Elisa’s Ethical sales procedure addressing Human Rights

Elisa’s ethical sales procedure is a Human rights Due Diligence (HRDD) process targeting to mitigate the risks of potential not acceptable use or misuse of the technology we provide including, but not limited to use of products to suppress human rights.
Elisa complies with applicable sanctions and export control regulations. A sanctions screening as well as dual use product assessment is carried out prior to the ethical sales procedure assessment, and export licenses are obtained when required under applicable laws.
The ethical sales procedure investigates a country’s long-term commitment to respect Human Rights, intended use of technology in question as well as , anti-bribery and corruption and customer related ethical risks. We also consider the political stability specific to the country as a part of this procedure.
The Elisa ethical sales assessment is triggered when the country risk is above a set threshold and assessment is conducted in the early stages of the sales process. All sales cases are reviewed according the ethical sales procedure, and it is a mandatory part of the sales approval process.
Required HRDD assessment is conducted by local business in assistance of local legal using provided assessment tools. The results of the assessment and the proposed mitigation measures are submitted into Elisa ethical sales procedure for decision making. We use an external assessment providers for country risk ratings.
We regularly monitor the status of country specific human rights risk ratings and status of current engagement with customers in countries categorised as high risk. Further revisit for the business case can be triggered in case of negative developments in human rights.
We provide tailor made training for our sales about the ethical sales procedure and improve the process on an ongoing basis.