Modern slavery statement

Modern Slavery Statement 2025

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Modern Slavery Statement 2025 [FR]

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8.83 MB

Modern slavery is a very real risk globally, including in developed markets. The indicate there are currently 50 million victims of modern slavery.

We know that we face a risk of involvement in modern slavery in many of the global regions where we operate, as well as through our value chain.

Freedom from slavery is a universal human right and we incorporate our work on identifying and addressing any involvement in modern slavery into our broader human rights program.

Addressing modern slavery

Addressing modern slavery is a key part of our commitment to putting people and safety first. Across our business we expect our employees and suppliers (including contractors and agents) to stay alert to the risks of modern slavery and work to prevent it.

Beyond setting high standards, we focus on targeted training, knowledge sharing and mitigation measures designed to ensure effectiveness.

We also collaborate with governments and organisations to strengthen global policies and regulations.

Championing women’s rights in Guinea

Kadiatou is redefining what it means to be a woman in mining in Guinea, and is inspiring young girls to do the same.

Our statement on modern slavery

We publish an annual statement on modern slavery to share our progress and learnings and outline future priorities.

The statement provides an overview of our business, modern slavery risks within our operations and supply chains, due diligence efforts, training, stakeholder engagement and remediation processes. It also explains how we assess our effectiveness, including internal tracking, audits, grievance monitoring, stakeholder feedback, and applying impact measurement frameworks. Our statement complies with global modern slavery reporting laws.

Safety is about more than preventing physical harm – it is also about respecting people and their right to safe and decent work. We can always do better and must continue to keep learning and improving across our business.”

- Mark Davies, Chief Safety & Technical Officer

A resilient value chain depends on collaboration and continuous learning across our suppliers, business partners and Rio Tinto. This is critical to addressing human rights risks. We set high standards and work with third parties to ensure they are met.”

- Bold Baatar, Chief Commercial Officer

Our progress

We continue to use a theory of change model to evaluate the impact of our modern slavery approach and measure our progress. Below are examples of key activities in 2025:

Understanding worker welfare: We developed a new Worker Welfare Assessment methodology, including worker interviews and cross-checking documents, to assess labour rights issues within our contracted workforce.
Identifying and assessing risk: We conducted more than 10,000 third party due diligence screenings and more than 175 specialist human rights reviews allowing us to tailor our mitigation actions to the risk profile of individual suppliers. We also worked with suppliers and business partners in Argentina, China and Guinea to share insights on labour rights performance.
Annual risk assessments at our managed assets: Our policies and procedures require our managed assets to assess their modern slavery risk on an annual basis, leading to better insights on our collective risk profile. We conducted 12 asset-level risk assessments in 2025, including at Richards Bay Minerals, Rincon and Oyu Tolgoi.
Building capacity: We continued to deliver targeted human rights training programs for senior leaders, employees and suppliers, designed to enable them to identify modern slavery risks relevant to their role. In 2025, we refreshed our whole-of-company learning to feature our own team members outlining potential risks within their area of the business. We also established a new Modern Slavery module for our Commercial team.

Assessing our effectiveness

We are consistently ranked well in various human rights and modern slavery benchmarks, including:

World Benchmarking Alliance Corporate Human Rights Benchmark (CHRB) – In early 2026, we scored 90/100 highlighting our progress in implementing the UN Guiding Principles on Business and Human Rights.
Monash Modern Slavery Benchmark (ASX) – In 2025 we scored ‘A’. We received a call out in the 2025 report for our approach to measuring effectiveness and tracking progress over time.

Collaboration

We engage with various multi-stakeholder initiatives to share our learnings and improve the industry’s collective response to modern slavery. This includes the Australia’s Modern Slavery Community of Practice and Human Rights Due Diligence Working Group.

We continue to co-chair the Human Rights Resources and Energy Collaborative (HRREC), a forum for practitioners to share insights, tackle challenges and develop best practices for respecting human rights and addressing modern slavery risks in operations and supply chains. It has more than 30 different active member companies from across the mining, energy, and oil and gas sectors.