Panel
Making Mandatory Sustainability Disclosure Work for Children’s Rights
ORGANIZED BY
UNICEF
15-Sep
14:15-15:15
Conference Room 2
Across Asia, mandatory sustainability disclosure is reshaping the State duty to protect—but it stays focused on climate while the social pillar remains thin. Gender, safety and labour are making the journey from silence to prescribed indicators. Children haven't. This session asks the regulators who drove that progress: what comes next?
Overview
Under Pillar I of the UN Guiding Principles, the State duty to protect calls for a "smart mix" of measures. Across Asia, one of the fastest-moving is mandatory sustainability disclosure—through instruments such as Malaysia's National Sustainability Reporting Framework, Thailand's One Report, the Philippines' sustainability reporting rules and India's BRSR. Disclosure is where human rights due diligence becomes visible and accountable: what regulators require, companies must show.
Yet evidence from Making Children Count (UNICEF, 2026)—a benchmark of 1,399 listed companies across nine Asian markets against 26 indicators—shows that impacts on the region's children remain inconsistently reported and rarely comparable. This session brings the regulators and exchanges who design these regimes into the Forum's implementation conversation: a dialogue between the BHR community and the market authorities whose rules shape what companies disclose, and therefore what rights-holders, civil society and investors can see and act on.
The timing matters. Asia now accounts for the majority of new mandatory disclosure rules worldwide, with jurisdictions aligning to the ISSB baseline—yet this build-out is heavily weighted toward climate, while the social pillar stays thin, fragmented and largely voluntary. The region's own record proves the model works: board gender diversity, workforce inclusion, occupational health and safety, and labour standards have travelled from silence to prescribed, comparable indicators—because regulators and exchanges required, guided and trained the market to report them.
Children have not yet made that journey. Where a framework names an issue, disclosure follows; where it stays silent, so do companies. For the BHR community, this makes disclosure regulation one of the most practical and underused entry points for advancing the UNGPs at scale: a single well-designed requirement reaches every listed company in a market at once. This session asks the regulators who drove that progress to share what worked—and consider how the same playbook transposes to children's rights.
Why it matters
Disclosure rules are the highest-leverage entry point in the BHR toolkit: one well-designed requirement reaches every listed company in a market at once. Asia is writing these rules now, aligning to the ISSB baseline—but the window is climate-heavy and closing. If children aren't named in the social pillar as it's built out, they'll be structurally invisible in the region's disclosure architecture for years. What gets required gets reported.
Key questions
What made social indicators like gender diversity, OHS and labour standards "stick" in Asian disclosure regimes—was it prescription, guidance, issuer training, or framework iteration—and which of those levers actually moved reporting?
What is the minimum viable intervention that would make child-related impacts visible and comparable— indicators, materiality guidance, other?
What can civil society, workers' organisations and investors currently see and act on—and where does the data still fail them?
Which role should play the regulators, stock exchanges, investors and companies themselves?
Who should attend?
Primary audience: securities regulators, stock exchanges and standard-setters designing sustainability disclosure regimes across Asia, but also BHR practitioners, investors and civil society actors working on corporate sustainability and ESG related themes.
The session is deliberately a meeting point between the rule-makers and the rule-users.
What participants will gain
A clear read on which regulatory levers actually drove social disclosure uptake in the region.
A transferable playbook for moving any under-reported issue from silence to prescribed, comparable indicators.
Evidence from Making Children Count (https://www.unicef.org/asia-pacific/reports/making-children-count-sustainability-reporting-across-emerging-asia) on where the current disclosure architecture leaves children invisible.
A concrete sense of next steps in their own market, and regionally, to keep the social pillar level with climate.