"A New Twist to Management Standards, Bringing in Human Rights", June 2014

The International Organization for Standardization (ISO) has a long history of setting international standards for products, services, and practices to foster global trade. Many of these standards are management system standards, the ISO 9001 quality management system standard probably being the best known and most implemented among them. While ISO already has a number of standards that address various aspects of security and risk management, until now there was no management standard for organizations seeking to deliver professional private security services in a fashion that ensures respect for human rights and humanitarian law. So when the American national standards body, ANSI, proposed creating an international management standard for provision of private security services, a new Project Committee had to be established to tackle the task...The PC's work on drafting a new international security operations management standard...will likely result in an ISO standard unlike any other. Currently, one other ISO standard directly addresses human rights matters in a more comprehensive fashion: the ISO 26000 guidance on Corporate Responsibility. ISO 26000 was recently updated to bring it more into line with the UN Guiding Principles on Business and Human Rights. However, as a guidance companies cannot be certified to it. In contrast, the ISO management standard for security operations will be a certifiable standard, to which organizations can demonstrate their conformance through a third party certification audit.