About us
The Banking on Human Rights project is coordinated by the Responsible Management Research Center (REMARC) at the University of Pisa. REMARC’s goal is to conduct inter-disciplinary research on companies’ responsible management practices and on sustainable development policies, and to have an impact on managers and on policy makers at the local, national and international levels.
The project
Do banks harm human rights? Can we track bank-related human rights harm over time? This Banking on Human Rights project helps to answer these questions by ranking banks and financial institutions according to the public evidence of their involvement in human rights abuses. It develops an index that is alternative to the existing ESG – Environment Social Governance indexes, as it focuses specifically on human rights harm. Thus, it captures only the adverse human rights impacts banks may have caused in their home or host countries, while it does not account for the banks’ human rights policies or positive human rights impacts. All the evidence that has been used for this project comes from publicly available sources.
Methodology
We have selected a sample of big banks and financial institutions from both advanced and developing economies and have used the Business and Human Rights Resource Center and other sources to retrieve evidence of our sample’s banks involvement in human rights abuses, which we have codified into a dataset. Next, using M-Quantile regression methods we have computed a Banks HUMAN RIGHTS Index which reflects a bank’s track record of involvement in allegations of human rights abuses.
