The 2020 Corporate Human Rights Benchmark is released against the backdrop of the ongoing COVID-19 crisis, which has exposed and exacerbated systemic weaknesses and abusive practices in global value chains. The benchmark assesses the human rights disclosures of 230 companies across five sectors identified as presenting a high risk of negative human rights impacts - agricultural products, apparel, extractives, ICT manufacturing and, for the first time, automotive manufacturing.

For the automotive sector the full CHRB methodology was applied, however in light of the COVID-19 pandemic, the other sectors were only assessed on a subset of the methodology in 2020, the core UNGP indicators.

The results show that while there has been some progress on previous years, only a minority of companies appear to demonstrate commitment to taking human rights seriously and there remains a disconnect between commitments and processes, and actual results. In the automotive sector, the results paint a particularly alarming picture, with the average score at just 12%, the lowest score ever for a CHRB-benchmarked sector. Similarly, human rights due diligence remains one of the weakest areas across the board, with nearly half of the companies assessed failing to score any points.

The key findings report gives a detailed briefing on the 2020 results and is available below.