ABSTRACT
There is an increasing raft of academic and popular discussion on the extent to which corporations, their activities and agendas, curtail human rights. As some of the largest and most amorphous corporations, financial services firms are ripe for criticism of their human rights records, despite expensive and well-publicised CSR campaigns. The financial crisis has highlighted, however, that even when the activities of financial services firms are instrumental in changing people’s fortunes and creating a climate in which rights realisation has a minimum price, the firms are largely supported and (in some cases) encouraged by governments, through loose regulation and growth-at-all-costs economic policy.
