On the 10th of December each year, the United Nations recognises Human Rights Day - a celebration of when, in 1948, the UN first proclaimed the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR).
The focus of Human Rights Day 2025 is “Our Everyday Essentials”, and the UN hopes for this year’s campaign to raise awareness (and grow appreciation) of how the UDHR secures the most everyday human rights: an adequate standard of living, freedom of opinion and expression, education, and rest and leisure.
Here in the global North and West, many of us likely take these things for granted, but this does not reflect the global reality. In some areas, human rights are not adequately protected, and are even abused by individuals, companies, and States. Here in the West, threats to these most fundamental of rights also seem to be growing, and so complacency is certainly ill-advised.
So, how to ensure our human rights - and the right to our everyday essentials - is protected? There are, of course, legal protections (though the efficacy of these varies from country to country), but the private sector also has a significant role to play. After all, the influence of companies is growing, and they are the type of organisation we interact with most on a day-to-day basis.
The Roles and Responsibilities of Business
Take the example of making a cup of coffee at work. The beans are sourced and sold by a company. The shop they’re bought from belongs to a company (or at least an independent business owner). The water from the tap is supplied by a company. The energy required to boil the kettle is provided by a company. The workplace that employs you is also likely a company; 82% of the UK workforce was employed by the private sector in Q2 2025, according to the Office for National Statistics.
As key participants in our everyday lives, it is the responsibility of companies to go about their business in a way that does not impede upon the human rights (as defined by international law) of their customers, employees, and others. That said, it is also their responsibility to ensure that the human rights of some people are not abused in the process of ensuring the rights of others.
In the Global North, things such as tea, coffee, and sugar are likely considered by many as essentials required for an adequate standard of living, and so the companies providing them are helping to provide a basic human right. However, in order to provide us with cheap products, these companies might be paying farmers in the Global South an unfair price for their crops. By doing so, they are limiting the ability of said farmers to achieve their own adequate standard of living, and in some cases denying the children of farming families the right to an education by creating a need for children to support family farms.
Even in more developed nations it is possible to find instances where human rights of some are sacrificed for the benefit of others. Take companies that are contracted to design and build (often with tight deadlines) considerable amounts of affordable housing. By building such housing, these companies are also helping to ensure that people can enjoy an adequate standard of living, but at the same time they can infringe upon the rights of their employees, depending on their practices.
Article 24 of the UDHR establishes the right of all people to rest and leisure, but companies (including our fictional construction companies) can limit the ability of their employees to enjoy this right by discouraging (or even denying) the right to take paid leave, establishing workloads that cannot realistically be met within contracted working hours (effectively forcing unpaid overtime), and creating working cultures that result in employees feeling compelled to be permanently “on-call”.
The Duty of (and Opportunity for?) Investors
The case that investment firms have a responsibility to avoid the abuse of human rights is an easy one to make, but it can also be argued that their duty goes further than this. Managers of money have their fiduciary duty to consider, and managing investments in the best interest of beneficiaries requires the management of risk.
Of course, emphasis has traditionally been placed on the management of financial risk, but the growth in ESG and increasing consideration of non-financial factors illustrates that many investment managers and others are moving beyond this narrative. Human rights-related risks are a prime example of risks that can materially impact the value of investments if managed poorly, and there are therefore grounds to argue that preventing losses attributable to human rights-related risks falls within scope of fiduciary duty.
Beyond any duties, investment firms have the opportunity to use client monies to help protect human rights and encourage change. By only investing in companies that demonstrate best (or at least adequate) practice when it comes to human rights, firms can play a role in market signalling, and by engaging with companies they can aim to drive change from within. Not only is this work rewarding in itself, but it may also help to attract and retain clients that are looking to invest in line with their values, and even invest for impact.
To Conclude
For us in the investment world, we hold considerable power and influence, and so - in the spirit of this years’ Human Rights Day - perhaps we should consider how to play our role in ensuring that our everyday essentials can be provided, without denying others the right to their own essentials.