Milan and London/Rotterdam, 2 December 2020. Eni and Unilever, two longstanding members of the World Business Council for Sustainable Development (WBCSD), ranked first among the 199 companies assessed by the Corporate Human Rights Benchmark (CHRB) in 2020, setting the bar high on business respect for human rights.
CHRB is an internationally recognized benchmark that assesses the human rights disclosures of companies. Every year, it compares the world’s largest companies in the extractive, agricultural products, apparel and ICT manufacturing sectors, and recently added automotive companies to its benchmark. The CHRB satisfies a growing interest by investors, governments and consumers to know how companies fulfill their responsibility to respect human rights, and companies failing to show progress over time have been called out in public and some have received pressure from shareholders to adopt more robust human rights approaches.
Eni and Unilever both significantly improved their benchmarking results over the past years and overtook their peers to top the ranking in 2020. Their continuous improvements confirm that rapid change is possible when companies commit to it and they show that benchmarks can in fact ignite a race to the top on corporate human rights performance.
More information on Eni’s and Unilever’s approaches is available in Eni for Human Rights report 2020 and Unilever Fairness in the Workplace.
