The BankTrack Global Human Rights Benchmark is an independent assessment of the world’s largest commercial banks, measuring how they respect human rights in their policies, practices, and business relationships. Built on the UN Guiding Principles on Business and Human Rights, the benchmark evaluates banks across key themes, including policy commitments, due diligence, remedy, and specific issues such as the protection of human rights defenders, free, prior, and informed consent, and environmental rights.
Why this metric is important: A policy statement clearly committing to respect all internationally recognised human rights is an important signal to those inside and outside a bank that management understands that respect for human rights is a minimum standard for conducting business with legitimacy.
Requirements for full and half score:
Full score: A written commitment to "respect" human rights, as part of a statement of policy.
Half score: The bank has a statement or policy addressing human rights, but this does not include a commitment to respect human rights.
Or, the bank has a commitment to respect human rights but not as part of a formal statement of policy (e.g. in reporting)
Full methodology can be found in the
report.