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Prohibited Actions Within the Company

Baseline internal conduct rules, independent of any counterparty. Derived from the international law baseline in reference/international-instruments.md, principally the ILO fundamental conventions, the ICCPR/ICESCR, and the UN Guiding Principles on Business and Human Rights (UNGPs).

Labor

  • No forced, bonded, or compulsory labor anywhere in company-controlled operations, including through recruitment agencies or labor brokers acting on the company's behalf (ILO C29, C105).
  • No employment of workers below the applicable minimum working age, and no worst forms of child labor anywhere in the operation, including through contractors (ILO C138, C182).
  • No interference with workers' freedom of association or right to collective bargaining, including retaliation against organizing activity (ILO C87, C98).
  • No discrimination in hiring, pay, promotion, or termination on the basis of race, sex, religion, political opinion, national origin, or other protected status (ILO C100, C111; ICCPR Art. 26).
  • No recruitment-fee schemes or passport/document confiscation practices that create debt bondage or restrict workers' freedom of movement.

Product and platform conduct

  • No knowing provision of products, services, or technical support that enables mass, indiscriminate surveillance of a population or protected group (ICCPR Art. 17).
  • No knowing provision of products or services whose primary purpose is to suppress protected freedom of expression, such as tooling built specifically to identify and censor political dissent (ICCPR Art. 19).
  • No design or deployment of biometric identification systems for the purpose of enabling repression of a specific group.
  • No transfer of dual-use technology in violation of applicable export-control regimes (e.g., Wassenaar Arrangement participating-state controls, EU Dual-Use Regulation) where the transfer is destined for known human-rights-abusive end use.

Data and government requests

  • No disclosure of user data to a government authority absent valid legal process, proportional to the request, and subject to the company's own legal review — regardless of whether the requesting government is itself designated a bad actor under GOVERNANCE.md.
  • No secret, unreviewable backdoor access built for any government or law enforcement customer.

Accountability

  • No retaliation against employees, contractors, or suppliers who raise a good-faith human rights concern (whistleblowers and human rights defenders).
  • The company must maintain an accessible, non-retaliatory grievance mechanism through which affected workers or communities can raise concerns and expect a response — this is the UNGP Pillar 3 "access to remedy" obligation, and it is not optional under this framework.

Complicity

  • No provision of products, services, financing, or labor that the company knows, or should reasonably know, will be used to facilitate arbitrary detention, torture, enforced disappearance, or extrajudicial killing — this applies even where the immediate counterparty is the company's own government-relations or public-sector team, not an external party.