RELX—May 2024
According to a legal threat issued by the company, RELX has responded to the human rights grievance mechanism in the form of an email to one of CRC's advisory board members
KEY OBSERVATIONS:
• RELX provides no information that was requested pertaining to environmental and human rights due diligence processes.
• RELX offers no timetable for when it will end support for fossil fuel expansion and misinformation, activities associated with broad human rights harms.
Climate Rights Coalition—February 2024
CRC and our partner groups send an initial communication to RELX. It contains an explanatory complaint submitted to the The Special Procedures of the United Nations Human Rights Council, detailing the science-based reasoning for positing company negligence of UNGP human rights obligations. A request is sent to RELX CEO Erik Engstrom and Global Head of Corporate Responsibility Márcia Balisciano in May 2024 to understand when the company will respond to the questions provided.
FULL TEXTREPORT TO THE UNKEY OBSERVATIONS:
• RELX oil and gas customers are not reducing production in line with a just Net Zero Transition.
• RELX serves fossil fuels expansion in the knowledge that they are facilitating the continued burning of fossil fuels.
• RELX must comply with its own responsibilities regarding the fossil fuel industry’s climate-related human rights impacts. There is a serious risk that RELX is failing to comply with its responsibilities.
With the UN's Human Rights Council resolution 48/13 unequivocally recognizing the human right to a clean, healthy and sustainable environment for all people, scientists initiated a dialogue with RELX in light of the human rights implications of its support of fossil fuel expansion.
—UN investigators, in a letter delivered to Aramco and various non-fossil fuel companies that are still facilitating new fossil fuel projects. June 23, 2023.
November 2023 / SUMMARY
Given human rights concerns, UCS and SGR offer an extension for having their questions answered and announce the initiation of a UNGP grievance mechanism. RELX offers no reply.
October 2023 / SUMMARY
October 2023 / SUMMARY
RELX Corporate Responsibility, replying for the CEOs, again neglects to signal an end to activity associated with severe human rights risks.
September 2023 / SUMMARY
Rebuttals refute the accuracy of company claims and leadership's inconsistency with its Code of Ethics. 4 questions are submitted pertaining to ending support of fossil fuel expansion and misinformation.
April 2023 / SUMMARY
April 2022 / SUMMARY
RELX Corporate Responsibility, replying for the CEOs, provides a response that does not signal an end to this activity, or alignment with the IPCC and IEA's net zero pathways.
October 2022 / SUMMARY
Union of Concerned Scientists and Scientists for Global Responsibility launch a scientist-driven petition regarding company support for fossil fuel expansion, activity inconsistent with a 1.5°C warming target and a just transition.
Employee reports from 2021-2023 document internal efforts at RELX to have the company stop messaging that misleads the public about the business and the size of the carbon budget. Such reports were included in a 2024 lawsuit.
—2024 lawsuit
—One Earth editor, offering comments for the September 2021 employee report
April 2023 / SUMMARY
Actions by RELX leadership in response to employee advocacy generates further confusion regarding what behaviors its ethics policies prohibit. A 2024 lawsuit would later attempt to address RELX's greenwashing and management practices.
October 2023 / SUMMARY
November 2022 / SUMMARY
An advocacy group update observes the continued RELX strategy of maintaining word-deed misalignment. An external participant at a company sustainability event reports feeling tricked and uninformed about the scope of the company's actions.
October 2023 / SUMMARY
September 2022 / SUMMARY
Employees share insights of climate scientists and conclude RELX's fossil fuel expansion efforts generate complicity in "crimes against humanity." Leadership successfully pressures employees to remove their names from the report, block the sharing of the report, and impose communications restrictions on the employee group. Management claims fossil fuel expansion is needed to avoid poverty and continues to falsely claim employees are taking issue with RELX's speed of response to the crisis—not that RELX is generating misleading claims.
April 2022 / SUMMARY
With Compliance and Sustainability leaders unwilling to define what its ethics code prohibits, a new report is generated detailing RELX's greenwashing practices. These include information suppression, misleading reports issued to investors, and intimidation. By RELX interpreting its sustainability and human rights commitments as allowing for complicity in ecocide, leaders are violating an ethics code that prohibits false and misleading claims. A new communications restriction is implemented.
April 2023 / SUMMARY
January 2022 / SUMMARY
A presentation at Cell Press questions the company's greenwashing practices. The deck and the September 2021 report is provided to all Cell Press employees "to help create more open and honest discussions around these complicated and pressing issues."
April 2023 / SUMMARY
September 2021 / SUMMARY
An employee group—including editors at The Lancet, The Lancet Planetary Health, and One Earth—reports RELX is practicing "climate denial." RELX is promoting the false idea that its primary negative impacts are from paper and travel, and that hydrocarbon customers RELX is serving in their fossil fuel expansion efforts are credibly transitioning. Employees request that RELX discontinue misleading claims and present a timeline for discontinuing activities that promote fossil fuel expansion. None is provided. Cell Press management declines to answer questions about public disclosures, retaliation, and other issues. An Elsevier sustainability leader expresses disappointment that employees don't focus on the company's positive impacts.
April 2021 / SUMMARY
Climate science renders RELX's various sustainability claims to be misleading, resulting in an ethics complaint. A One Earth editor who provided input for this associated report concludes that "Overall I think this is excellent." RELX's response to the ethics complaint neglects ethics reporting procedures. Rather than acknowledging that the company is obligated to cease making false and misleading claims, management falsely maintains that the issue being raised is option-based claims about what actions RELX should take to address the climate crisis. Communications restrictions are imposed on the reporting employee that limit his ability to share materials that reveal the company's misrepresentations.
Grievance Mechanisms are defined by the UN Guiding Principles on Business and Human Rights (UNGPs) as “any routinized, State-based or non-State-based, judicial or non-judicial process through which grievances concerning business-related human rights abuse can be raised and remedy can be sought.” Grievance Mechanisms can be initiated on behalf of or by anyone "potentially impacted by the business enterprise’s activities,” where potential impacts are “linked to their operations, products or services" and “business relationships.”
The UNGPs are divided into three chapters (“pillars”), the third of which is devoted to access to remedy and which details the complementary roles of judicial and non-judicial mechanisms. The outcome from a Grievance Mechanism can take a range of forms, such as apologies, restitution, rehabilitation, financial or non-financial compensation, and punitive sanctions—whether criminal or administrative, such as fines—as well as the prevention of harm through, for example, injunctions or guarantees of non-repetition of the activities in question.
RELX pledges to "consider the UN Guiding Principles on Business and Human Rights" in all [its] activities" and has committed to uphold the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, which states that “everyone has the right to a standard of living adequate for the health and well-being of himself and of his family, including food, clothing, housing and medical care and necessary social services, and the right to security.” International human rights law requires an effective remedy where such rights or freedoms have been violated.
As noted in an IPCC special report, “climate-related risks to health, livelihoods, food security, water supply, human security, and economic growth are projected to increase with global warming of 1.5°C and increase further with 2°C.” With RELX/Elsevier providing technological and geographic guidance for the fossil fuel industry majors to develop new resources that are misaligned with any safe warming target, Elsevier has notably not been adhering to its commitment to "discontinuing activities with potentially adverse climate change-related human rights impacts." It is the right of all stakeholders to seek remedy.