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: Banks, like any other business, can either cause, contribute to, or be directly linked to adverse human rights impacts, and it has been well-established that banks can contribute to adverse impacts through their provision of finance.38 A bank can identify its relationship to an impact, actual or potential, through human rights due diligence. If a bank identifies that it has caused or contributed to an adverse impact, it has a responsibility to actively participate in its remediation. To fulfil their human rights responsibilities, banks must be committed to remediation and have the necessary processes in place to remedy impacts they have caused or contrib- uted to when these are identified.