Sam Jones, Rich Stazinski, and Rebecca DeWinter-Schmitt (Investor Alliance for Human Rights) explore investor responses to the Russian war against Ukraine in Cambridge University’s Business and Human Rights Journal. 

Following the Russian annexation of Crimea in 2014, many investors responded by unloading their Russian sovereign debt holdings. However, data from Bloomberg show that at the time of the 24 February Russian invasion of Ukraine, ESG funds – investment funds pursuing environmental, social and governance goals – still held at least $8.3 billion in Russian assets; and while more than a thousand companies have curtailed their Russian operations and over 500 are holding off on new investments in the wake of Russia’s invasion, investors have been accused of being ‘missing in action’. 

“At a time when investors are increasingly and (rightly) citing the UNGPs during company engagements as the gold standard for responsible corporate behaviour, they must simultaneously recognize their own responsibilities under this framework. In the absence of decisions being made through heightened HRDD, investors run the risk of failing to meaningfully respect human rights or worse, inadvertently funding the Russian war machine.”