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INTRODUCTION Human rights defenders (defenders) play a critical role in promoting corporate respect for human rights. Through their work, defenders help to identify, prevent, mitigate, and ensure accountability for corporate human rights abuses. Whether coming from, living in, representing, or supporting affected communities, defenders are both directly affected by, and key stakeholders regarding, the human rights impacts of business. Despite this, the incidence of attacks, threats, and harassment against defenders working on business and human rights issues is on the rise. Defenders around the world face significant risks to their lives and livelihoods on a daily basis, as they work under the threat of extrajudicial killings, abductions, surveillance, criminalisation, and intimidation as a result of their efforts to defend human rights in the face of business interests.1 These risks have been recognised by various United Nations (UN) and regional human rights bodies.2 Meanwhile, a range of UN experts, civil society organisations, and business representatives have repeatedly made the legal, moral, and business case for ensuring that defenders working on business and human rights are protected and consulted.3 In this context, it is crucial that States provide for the protection of human rights defenders by ensuring that the content of their National Action Plans (NAPs) on business and human rights include measures to prevent attacks against defenders and to ensure that defenders are supported, consulted, and free from aggressions, harassment, restriction, interference, and barriers to justice.4 Ensuring the effective protection of defenders through NAPs also requires that defenders are substantially engaged and consulted in the process of a NAP’s development. The UN Guiding Principles on Business and Human Rights (Guiding Principles) establish that States should engage in meaningful consultations with “potentially affected groups and other relevant stakeholders” to identify the human rights impacts of their work.5 As such, the State is obliged to consult defenders during the NAP process. In incorporating defender input into both the substance and process of a NAP, States should strive to apply the highest standards of international law and be guided not only by the Guiding Principles, but also by the UN Declaration on the Rights and Responsibility of Individuals, Groups, and Organs of Society to Promote and Protect Universally Recognized Human Rights and Fundamental Freedoms (UN Declaration on Human Rights Defenders) and conventions related to free, prior, and informed consent.6 A range of reports by UN and regional human rights experts regarding the consultation and protection of defenders working on business and human rights,7 as well as those of non-­‐governmental organisations, should also assist States in this endeavour.8 1