"Documenting respect for human rights in the financial sector 2025," 25 January 2026

This report provides a benchmark of the human rights policies and self-reported human rights due diligence practices of 23 of the largest Danish financial institutions. The financial institutions represent four different financial sector categories: pension funds, banks, insurance companies, and investment management firms. The report examines how they communicate to the public about their commitments and approaches to avoiding and addressing negative human rights impacts in relation to their financial activities.

The financial institutions are benchmarked on 8 indicators derived from UNGPs and existing human rights benchmark initiatives such as the Corporate Human Rights Benchmark. The 2025 benchmark is the second iteration and includes comparisons with findings from the first iteration of the benchmark, carried out in 2023, where relevant.

The key findings in the benchmark are:

• Overall documented alignment with the UN Guiding Principles remains low, with little evidence of sustained improvement across the sector.
• Policy commitments are relatively strong, but they are often not supported by disclosures showing how commitments are implemented in practice.
• Stakeholder engagement and remedy remain the weakest areas, with very limited information disclosed on engagement with affected stakeholders or approaches to remediation.
• Human rights due diligence has seen setbacks, particularly regarding risk identification and assessment across financial activities.
• Pension funds continue to perform better than banks and insurance, even though the highest-performing institutions demonstrate only partial alignment.