Investors with nearly US$7 trillion in assets call out leading companies over human rights performance

With the publication of the Corporate Human Rights Benchmark (CHRB) 2020 Report, the Investor Alliance for Human Rights is calling for investors to hold companies accountable to improve and disclose their human rights performance.

Investors can sign onto the "Investor Statement Calling on Companies to Improve Performance on the Corporate Human Rights Benchmark", along with the already 212 investors representing nearly US$7 trillion in assets under management who signed this statement. It demonstrates that socially responsible investors around the globe are increasingly coalescing around the need to ensure that companies integrate respect for human rights at the heart of their business.

This Investor Statement calls on companies who have scored poorly, many of whom scored 0 on human rights due diligence in the CHRB reports, to publicly demonstrate their respect for human rights by conducting human rights due diligence to identify, prevent, mitigate, and account for how they address the most severe risks to people in connection with their business.

As well as being something that responsible companies should be doing as a matter of course, mitigating human rights risks makes clear business sense as it reduces exposure to other risks such as operational delays, reputational harm, financial loss, and legal liabilities.

You can read our 2021 press release on this initiative here. 

Additional investors who would like to sign on to the statement can do so by filling out this form.

For the 2019 CHRB results, a group of 176 institutional investors representing over $4.5 trillion in assets under management joined forces to call out the human rights performance of some of the world’s most well-known companies. They identified the 95 worst performing companies on human rights due diligence and urged these companies to take decisive action before June 2020. You can find more details in our March 2020 press release here.

For more information on this engagement, please contact Rebecca DeWinter-Schmitt at rdewinter@iccr.org.