Financial Services Human Rights Benchmark
Measuring the human rights impacts of financial services
Our benchmark allows users to easily compare and understand financial services entities (FSEs) from a human rights perspective. We assess their performance across six human rights categories and five areas of impact.
Financial services are behind in their thinking with regard to how, and to what extent, their core business activities impact human rights.
The sector has been dogged by human myriad rights-related incidents and issues in recent times, including:
By measuring performance against a set of indicators and across a range of impact areas designed specifically for the financial services sector, the ethical actions of these institutions can be documented, benchmarked and evaluated.
Based on all publicly available information, this research allows us, and others, to look beyond the philanthropic work often highlighted by these institutions and evaluate how their core business activities impact human rights.
Professor David Kinley holds the Chair in Human Rights Law at the University of Sydney Law School.
He is also an Academic Expert member of Doughty Street Chambers in London, a founding member of Australian Lawyers for Human Rights and a member of the Australian Council for Human Rights. He was previously the founding Director of the Castan Centre for Human Rights Law at Monash University from 2000 to 2005.
Specialising in the profound and intriguing intersections between human rights and the global economy, he has been at the forefront of this fast-growing subject area from its inception some 25 years ago.
He is a former Fulbright Senior Scholar and has taught and lectured at more than a dozen universities worldwide, from Oxford, La Sorbonne, and Harvard, to West Point Military Academy, the University of the South Pacific, and the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences.
David has also worked with a wide range of international organizations including the UN, the World Bank, and the EU, as well as government agencies, law firms, multinational corporations and NGOs in Australia, Asia, Africa, the Pacific Islands, Europe and North America.
His books include Civilising Globalisation in 2009; The International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights (with Saul and Mowbray), 2014 (winner of the American Society of International Law Book Prize in 2015); Necessary Evil, 2018 (winner of the Axiom International Business Book Award in 2020); and most recently The Liberty Paradox. He also has a TEDx video: How Much do Banks Owe Us?
David’s full and formal curriculum vitae is available here.
