Human rights data for the private sector | Human Rights Measurement Initiative

“We want to see all governments taking their human rights scores as seriously as they do economic statistics. When human rights are properly incorporated into investment decisions, this will reduce risk and improve sustainability. It will also help create a world where all governments are highly motivated to treat their people well. If you are an investor or ESG data provider, you can help innovate by incorporating our scores into your investment decisions or ESG data products.”

– Anne-Marie Brook, HRMI Co-Founder and Executive Director

In 2021 the Human Rights Measurement Initiative kicked off a new workstream, exploring opportunities for human rights data to support the private sector in stepping up their influence on country-level human rights.

Private sector actors such as businesses and investors often focus on their human rights impacts at a company level, but they also have influence over governments, as discussed in this article in The Conversation. While many are already paying attention to pillar 2 of the UN Guiding Principles around the corporate responsibility to protect human rights, there is less familiarity around the State’s duty to protect (pillar 1) and access to remedy (pillar 3).

Our engagement has revealed that there is significant demand from private sector actors for robust and comprehensive country-level human rights data. Such data can help with integrating human rights assessments into a wide range of investment decisions (including ESG and sustainable sovereign debt investing), to assess and manage the risks faced by companies operating in different countries, to ensure robust human rights due diligence, and more.

In response to feedback that the Rights Tracker is not sufficiently meeting the data needs of the investor community, we have developed a new product called Rights Tracker: Investor. This dataset is based on our core measurement work but tailored for the needs of the private sector. In 2023 we plan to launch this as a data subscription service. In the meantime, if you would like to join a free pilot of this dataset in return for providing us with useful feedback, please contact us.

Human rights are politically sensitive and can be a hot potato for investors. HRMI specialises in catching all the hot potatoes with our oven mitts on, so we can process them and turn them into meaningful accessible human rights data. We are developing a unique and powerful network of trusted human rights experts around the world, and compiling their knowledge into meaningful country scores and qualitative data, to make it easier for firms who want to do in-country human rights due diligence but who do not have these relationships.

Related resources

A recent World Bank publication uses one part of the Rights Tracker Investor dataset to explore the implications of economic and social rights for sovereign debt investing.
If you are a researcher who would like to use the full Rights Tracker Investor dataset to explore the financial materiality of human rights for financial returns, please sign up here.
If you are one of our civil society or human rights expert stakeholders, we invite your input on this workstream in this post.