Human rights
Conflict, instability, displacement, discrimination, climate change—the world faces major social challenges around human development and human rights. These issues require global efforts to secure a truly sustainable and prosperous future for all.
Human rights are universal. This means that every person around the world deserves to be treated with dignity and have their interests considered equally. While governments have the duty to protect individuals against human rights abuses, businesses are increasingly recognising their own moral, legal, and commercial responsibility. The OECD Guidelines for Multinational Enterprises and the UN Guiding Principles for Business and Human Rights form the basis for what businesses should adhere to.
On the one hand, businesses can hinder human rights, as evidenced by reports around the world of unsafe working conditions, migrant worker exploitation, and harm done to communities. On the other hand, businesses can help advance human rights by offering access to decent work, creating higher living standards, protecting children’s rights and procuring goods in a responsible manner.
As a bank, we make a substantial contribution to human rights as financier, employer, taxpayer and driver of progress and prosperity. Our impact is on different levels:
- Our workplace
- Our supply chain
- How we do business and who we do business with
- Partnering and sharing knowledge
In ING’s latest Human Rights Review (2021/22) we disclose the most severe human rights issues in our banking operations and provide updates on our progress in managing human rights risks in our own operations and on our client engagement tool. In earlier editions we addressed the changing external landscape and our response to Covid-19 (2020); our role as a corporate lender and engagement with clients on human rights (2019); and our human rights management approach, policies and priorities (2018).
Read more on our human rights page.
You might also be interested in:
- ING in the media on this topic
- ING publishes Human Rights report
- ING joins industry, unions, NGOs, government in fight to protect human rights
- ING’s response to the Business and Human rights resource center (External website)
- ING’s reaction to the Fair Finance Guide report “Living Wage” (PDF 0,04 MB) (in Dutch only)
- ING response to controversy around a project in Angola
- Our policies
- ING statement on human rights (PDF 9,1 MB)
- ESR policy
- ING Procurement Sustainability Standards (PDF 0,1 MB)
- Our Commitment
- From theory to practice (examples)
- ING Values (PDF 0,1 MB)
- ING UN Global Compact Communication on Progress (External website)
- Human rights and the workplace (PDF 0,2 MB)
- Diversity and Inclusion
- This is ING too. ING networks (External website)
- ING and the Dakota Access pipeline
- Thun Group discussion paper January 2017 (PDF 0,5 MB)
- Six steps since signing the Dutch Banking Agreement on Human Rights
- Balancing human rights in our operations
- What do independent specialists say about sustainability and ING?
Contact
Mail to: Sustainability@ing.com