"Most large banks still failing to implement UN human rights principles, new BankTrack benchmark finds," 27 November 2024

Despite gradual progress, banks show little action in addressing impacts, protecting vulnerable groups and supporting affected communities.

A new benchmark from BankTrack shows that banks are still not yet fully implementing their responsibilities to respect human rights. BankTrack’s fifth Global Human Rights Benchmark report assessed 50 of the world’s largest banks on their fulfilment of responsibilities outlined in the UN Guiding Principles on Business and Human Rights. Thirteen years on from the unanimous endorsement of these Principles by the UN Human Rights Council in 2011, no bank was found to fully comply with the Principles, with 70% of the banks assessed scoring less than half marks and ranking as “laggards” or “followers”...

On a more positive note, banks are making some progress towards improving their policies and processes for managing human rights. Only seven banks were ranked as “laggards”, the lowest category, compared with 10 in the previous report two years ago. The average score achieved shows a modest improvement, to 5.9 points out of 15 in 2024, up from 5.1 out of 14 in 2022. This increase is observable despite the addition of the extra core criterion...

Other key findings of the report include:

• Most banks have human rights policy statements in place...
• Banks fall short in demonstrating meaningful consultation with potentially affected people...
• Human rights reporting has made limited progress...
• Bank responses to human rights enquiries are getting worse instead of better. Data from BankTrack’s Response Tracking database show 21 banks either ignored all enquiries or issued non-committal replies when human rights issues were raised in letters to the bank. Only 15% of communications sent to banks elicited a response describing any kind of action being taken by the bank to prevent, mitigate or address the impact raised...

All banks were invited to provide feedback on their draft scores. 34 banks out of 50 responded with comments, and a further five banks responded with no comments or only acknowledged receipt. Only 11 banks did not at all respond to our request for comments (down from 12 in 2022).