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: The UN Guiding Principles state that a business’ human rights policy should be approved at the most senior level of the business enterprise. Ensuring senior management attention to and accountability for human rights is likely to help ensure policies and procedures are effective, as is also recognised by the Corporate Human Rights Bench- mark, with which this criterion is aligned.