Breaking the Silence: Human Rights Disclosure in European Banks

ABSTRACT The growing public and regulatory emphasis on human rights has heightened expectations for corporate transparency, positioning human rights disclosure (HRD) as a critical dimension of non‐financial reporting. Although academic interest in HRD is increasing, the banking sector remains underexplored, and limited research has examined the factors influencing the dissemination of human rights information in this context. This study seeks to address this gap by investigating HRD practices within the European banking sector, focusing on the extent to which banks disclose human rights information through their official websites. Drawing on the managerial perspective of stakeholder theory, this study examines whether specific bank characteristics—namely size, age, Internet visibility, and internationalization—affect the level of HRD. To evaluate HRD, this study introduces a disclosure index informed by previous literature and expert input, comprising 25 items across four stakeholder‐related areas: employees, customers, communities, and suppliers and business partners. It then applies manual content analysis to 131 European bank websites and employs a regression model to test the proposed research hypotheses. The results show that bank size and internationalization are positively associated with the level of HRD, while age and Internet visibility are not statistically significant. These findings contribute to multiple strands of academic literature and offer practical implications for standard‐setting bodies, policymakers, and banking institutions.