New Publication: Banks and human rights: what do we know?

Elisa Giuliani, Chiara Macchi, Federica Nieri and Verdiana Morreale have published their article Banks and human rights: what do we know? in A Research Agenda for Business and Human Rights edited by Tricia D. Olsen , Judith Schrempf-Stirling, and Harry J. Van Buren III.

Abstract

Banks and other financial and insurance institutions (hereinafter banks) are often neglected by business and human rights scholarship. While perhaps less visible than manufacturing or extractive industries’ human rights impacts, banks mobilize trillions of dollars to fund projects that can have severe negative human rights impacts; they can also act as perpetrators of human rights abuses. We draw on a novel dataset, including some 178 banks from 27 different countries observed between 1990 and 2018, to provide an empirical categorization of banks’ human rights abuses. Based on extant UN classifications, we find that 15% of reported abuses are directly caused by banks (‘causing’ direct abuse); another 15% are abuses perpetrated by clients or other actors under the influence of banks (‘contributed to’), while most (70%) cases are about abuses where the bank is financially linked to the abusive project (e.g., via minority shares or project financing) but the abuse is not committed due to the influence of the bank, which is therefore only indirectly connected to the abusive conduct. We discuss the implications of these findings for policy.