Overview
Rights CoLab seeks to strengthen civil society and reshape the systems that govern investor and business behaviour to fortify human rights.
Investors have an important role to play in influencing corporate stewardship of human rights and equality. However, investors do not widely agree it is their responsibility to act and they lack an understanding of best-practice needed to evaluate the quality of their portfolio companies’ human rights performance. Our funding will support Rights Colab’s work to create guidance and tools that investors could use to assess the human rights and diversity performance of their portfolio and engage effectively with their portfolio companies on these issues.
Greater evidence of how human rights and diversity affect portfolio returns would not only encourage investors to monitor these issues within their portfolios, but it could also encourage financial regulators to mandate the practice. The International Sustainability Standards Board (ISSB) presents an opportunity to regulate and harmonise expectations regarding company disclosures on human rights and diversity by providing a framework for company disclosure and ensuring availability of information needed by investors. The ISSB asks for disclosures only on issues that are considered financially material.
Our funding will also support Right CoLab’s project to use data science to gather evidence that supports the case that human rights and diversity issues are financially material to investors. Rights CoLab has experience using evidence generated in this way to influence broader inclusion of human rights topics in SASB and will seek to produce equally robust evidence that could influence disclosure standards.
Read more about Rights CoLab’s work on their website: RightsCoLab.org.