humen rights

Measuring Human Rights: Principle, Practice, and Policy Author(s): Todd Landman Source: Human Rights Quarterly, Vol. 26, No. 4 (Nov., 2004), pp. 906-931 Published by: The Johns Hopkins University Press Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/20069767 . Accessed: 11/01/2014 13:48

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HUMAN RIGHTS QUARTERLY

Measuring Human Rights: Principle, Practice, and Policy

Todd Land man*

ABSTRACT

This paper demonstrates why human rights measurement is important, how

human rights have been measured to date, and how such measures can be

improved in the future. Through focusing primarily but not exclusively on

the measurement of civil and political rights, the paper argues that human

rights can be measured in principle, in practice, and as outcomes of

government policy. Such measures include the coding of formal legal

documents, events-based, standards-based, and survey-based data, as well

as aggregate indicators that serve as indirect measures of rights protection.

The paper concludes by stressing the need for continued provision of high quality information at the lowest level of aggregation, sharing information

and developing an ethos of replication, and long term investment in data

collection efforts.

I. INTRODUCTION

Human rights scholars, practitioners, and activists use a variety of measures

and indicators to describe the advances and setbacks in the promotion and

* Todd Landman is Senior Lecturer in the Department of Government and Co-Director, Human

Rights Centre, University of Essex. He is author of Protecting Human Rights: A Global

Comparative Study (Georgetown University Press, forthcoming), Issues and Methods in

Comparative Politics (Routledge 2000, 2003), Governing Latin America (Polity Press, 2003

with Joe Foweraker & Neil Harvey), and Citizenship Rights and Social Movements: A

Comparative and Statistical Analysis (Oxford University Press 1997, with Joe Foweraker). The author would like to acknowledge the support of the European Commission (Eurostat

Contract No. 200221200005) in funding the project on measuring democracy, good governance, and human rights from which this article emerged. He also wishes to thank Julia

H?usermann, Sebastian Dellepiane, Matthew Sudders, Olivia Wills, and Patrick Ball for their

discussions.

Human Rights Quarterly 26 (2004) 906-931 ? 2004 by The Johns Hopkins University Press

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2004 Measuring Human Rights 907

protection of human rights, to provide explanations for their overall global variation, and to find solutions to guarantee their improved protection in the

future. The international community has established an ideal standard of

human rights protection formally laid out in the international law of human

rights, which extends from the anti-slavery measures in the nineteenth

century to the most recent statute establishing the International Criminal

Court. Between ninety-five and 191 countries have become signatories to

the main legal instruments comprising the international human rights

regime, where both the breadth and depth of formal participation has

expanded since the 1948 UN Declaration.1 In addition, countries have

become parties to various regionally based systems for the promotion and

protection of human rights, including the European, Inter-American, and

African systems. Global evidence on human rights violations, however,

suggests that "there are more countries in the world today where fundamen

tal rights and civil liberties are regularly violated than countries where they are effectively protected."2

Thus, despite the growth and proliferation of legal instruments for the

protection of human rights, there is a continuing disparity between official

proclamation and actual implementation of human rights protection. Since

the 1980s, this disparity has been a fruitful area for systematic comparative research.3 Such empirical research includes studies that examine the global variation in human rights protection4; the relationship between human

1. Ann F. Bayefsky, The UN Human Rights Treaty System: Universality at the Crossroads, York University Human Rights Project (2001 ), available at www.yorku.ca/hrights; Todd Landman,

Measuring the International Human Rights Regime, paper presented at the 97th Annual

Meeting of the American Political Science Association, San Francisco (2001 ) (on file with

author); Todd Landman, Measuring Human Rights and the Impact of Human Rights Policy, paper presented at the EU Conference on Human Rights Impact Assessment, Brussels (2001); Todd Landman, The Economic Requirements of Democracy, in

Encyclopedia of Democratic Thought (Paul Barry Clarke & Joe Foweraker eds., 2001 ); Todd

Landman, The Evolution of the International Human Rights Regime: Political and Economic Determinants, paper presented at the 98th Annual Meeting of the American Political Science Association, Boston, 29 Aug.-1 Sept. 2002.

2. A.H. Robertson & J.G. Merrills, Human Rights in The World: An Introduction to the Study of the International Protection of Human Rights 2 (4th ed. 1996).

3. Todd Landman, Comparative Politics and Human Rights, 24 Hum. Rts. Q. 890 (2002). 4. Neil J. Mitchell & James M. McCormick, Economic and Political Explanations of Human

Rights Violations, 40 World Politics 476 (1988); Conway Henderson, Conditions

Affecting the Use of Political Repression, 35 J. Conf. Res. 120 (1991); Conway Henderson, Population Pressures and Political Repression, 74 Soc. Sei. Q. 322 (1993);

Stephen C Poe & C Neil T?te, Repression of Human Rights to Personal Integrity in the 1980s: A Global Analysis, 88 Am. Pol. Sci. Rev. 853 (1994); Christian Davenport, Multi

dimensional Threat Perception and State Repression, 39 Am. J. Pol. Sci. 683 (1995); Scott S. Gartner & Patrick M. Regan, Threat and Repression, 33 J. Peace Res. 273 (1996);

Stephen C. Poe et al., Repression of the Human Right to Personal Integrity Revisited: A

Global Cross-National Study Covering the Years 1976-1993, 43 Int'l Stud. Q. 291

(1999).

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908 HUMAN RIGHTS QUARTERLY Vol. 26

rights treaty ratification and human rights protection5; refugee policy and

human rights6; economic assistance and human rights7; military assistance

and human rights8; democracy and human rights9; and direct foreign investment and human rights.10 Moreover, the attention to the persistent

difference between "rights in principle" and "rights in practice"11 has

motivated academics, policy makers, nongovernmental organizations (NGOs), and human rights practitioners to promote public and international

policies that bring actual human rights practices more in line with the

expectations laid out in the international human rights regime. In light of these developments in the formal and legal enumeration of

rights and global variation of their protection, this article demonstrates the

continued need for and use of meaningful, valid, time-series measures of

human rights protection. Part one of the article argues that in addition to the

inherent value in monitoring and documenting human rights violations, human rights measurement is important for classifying different types of

violation, mapping violations over space and time, and conducting second

order analysis of violations. Part two examines the ethical, political, and

methodological problems surrounding human rights measurement and

5. Markku Suksi, Bringing in the People: A Comparison of Constitutional Forms and Practices of the

Referendum (1993); Linda C Keith, The United Nations International Covenant on Civil

and Political Rights: Does it Make a Difference in Human Rights Behavior?, 36 J. Peace

Res. 95 (1999); Todd Landman, Protecting Human Rights: A Global Study (2004); Oona Hathaway, Do Treaties Make a Difference? Human Rights Treaties and the

Problem of Compliance, 111 Yale L. J. 1935 (2002). 6. Mark Gibney & Michael Stohl, Human Rights and US Refugee Policy, in Open Borders?

Closed Societies?: The Ethical and Political Issues (Mark Gibney ed., 1988); Mark Gibney et al., USA Refugee Policy: A Human Rights Analysis Update, 5 J. Ref. Stud. 37 (1992).

7. Michael Stohl et al., Human Rights and US Foreign Assistance, 21 J. Peace Res. 215

(1984); Stephen C. Poe, Human Rights and Economic Aid Allocation, 36 Am. J. Pol. Sci.

147 (1992); Stephen C. Poe & Rangsima Sirirangsi, Human Rights and US Economic Aid

to Africa, 18 Int'l Interactions 1 (1993); Stephen C Poe & Rangsima Sirirangsi, Human

Rights and Economic Aid During the Reagan Years, 75 Soc. Sci. Q. 494 (1994); Patrick M.

Regan, US Economic Aid and Political Repression, 48 Pol. Res. Q. 613 (1995). 8. William J. Dixon & Bruce E. Moon, Military Burden and Basic Human Rights Needs, 30

J. Conf. Res. 660 (1986); Stephen C Poe, Human Rights and the Allocation of US Military

Assistance, 28 J. Peace Res. 1 (1991 ); Stephen C Poe & James Meernik, US Military Aid in

the 1980s: A Global Analysis, 32 J. Peace Res. 399 (1995). 9. Christian Davenport, Human Rights and the Democratic Proposition, 43 J. Conf. Res. 92

(1999); Sabine C Zanger, A Global Analysis of the Effect of Regime Changes on Life

Integrity Violations, 1977-1993, 37 J. Peace Res. 213 (2000). 10. William H. Meyer, Human Rights andMNCs: Theory vs. Quantitative Evidence, 18 Hum.

Rts. Q. 368 (1996); William H. Meyer, Confirming, Infirming, and Falsifying Theories of

Human Rights: Reflections on Smith, Bolyard, and Ippolito Through the Lens of Lakatos, 21 Hum. Rts. Q. 220 (1999).

11. Joe Foweraker & Todd Landman, Citizenship Rights and Social Movements: A Comparative and

Statistical Analysis (1997); see also Christian Davenport, Constitutional Promises and

Repressive Reality, 58 J. Pol. 627 (1996).

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2004 Measuring Human Rights 909

shows how some of these problems have been overcome. Part three shows

how political and civil rights have been measured to date and how

discussions of their measurement are also useful for measuring economic,

social, and cultural rights. Part four summarizes the various ways in which

human rights can and have been measured and discusses the implications of human rights measurement for the wider policy arena.

II. WHY MEASURE HUMAN RIGHTS?

Measuring human rights serves the following four functions: (1) contextual

description, monitoring, and documentation of violations; (2) classification

of different types of violations; (3) mapping and pattern recognition of

violations over space and time; and (4) secondary analysis that provides

explanations for violations and policy solutions for reducing them in the

future. Contextual description provides the raw information upon which measures of human rights are based. Classification allows for the differentia

tion of rights violations across their civil, political, economic, social, and

cultural dimensions. Mapping provides time-series and spatial information on the broad patterns of violations within and across different countries.

Finally, secondary analysis tests hypotheses about rights violations, the

inferences from which can be fed into the policy making process, whether that involves sanctions and conditionalities imposed on rights-violating states, prioritizing domestic spending to improve rights conditions, or

bringing about a change in institutions and practices. Thus, the accumula

tion of information on human rights protection in the world and the results of systematic analysis can serve as the basis for the continued development of human rights policy, advocacy, and education.12 Moreover, "to forswear the use of available, although imperfect, data does not advance scholar

ship,"13 nor does it allow for the kind of continued human rights activism

that seeks to eliminate the worst forms of human behavior.

Despite the good intentions behind and valuable reasons for measuring human rights, important ethical, methodological, and political problems remain. Ethically, it can be dehumanizing to use statistics to analyze

12. Barnett R. Rubin & Paula R. Newberg, Statistical Analysis for Implementing Human

Rights Policy, in The Politics of Human Rights 268 (Paula R. Newberg ed., 1980); Richard P. Claude & Thomas B. Jabine, Exploring Human Rights Issues with Statistics, in Human

Rights and Statistics: Getting the Record Straight 5-34 (Richard P. Claude & Thomas B.

Jabine eds., 1992). 13. J.C Strouse & Richard P. Claude, Empirical Comparative Rights Research: Some

Preliminary Tests of Development Hypotheses, in Comparative Human Rights 52 (Richard P.

Claude ed., 1976).

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910 HUMAN RIGHTS QUARTERLY Vol. 26

violations of human rights,14 and it is often difficult to judge the relative

weight of one type of violation over another, thereby committing some form

of moral relativism. Methodologically, raw numbers of violations are

continuous without an upper limit, which can make them intractable for

comparative purposes,15 while the level of available information on viola tions can vary.16 Politically, International Government Organizations (IGOs) and NGOs refuse to rank countries with regard to their human rights practices for fear of recrimination and loss of credibility. Indeed, the United

Nations Development Programme (UNDP) came under strong political criticism for its 1991 Human Development Report, which used a measure of

human rights that ranked all UN member states according to categories derived from the UN Declaration.17 The next section addresses these various

concerns as it examines how to measure human rights.

III. HOW TO MEASURE HUMAN RIGHTS

Measuring human rights is based on several assumptions. First, despite the

absence of strong philosophical foundations for the existence of human

rights,18 the accumulation of international human rights law provides ideal

standards for those rights that should be protected.19 Second, violations

have been and continue to be committed by state and nonstate actors.

Third, individuals and groups that suffer abuse of their rights can provide information and testimony, while human rights practitioners can provide standardized mechanisms for such reporting. Numerous accounts of human

rights abuse have been provided to formal bodies, such as the International

Military Tribunal in Nuremberg,20 the International Criminal Tribunals for

14. Jabine & Claude, supra note 12.

15. Herbert Spirer, Violations of Human Rights?How Many?, 49 Am. J. Econ. & Soc. 199

(1990). 16. Kenneth A. Bollen, Political Rights and Political Liberties in Nations: An Evaluation of

Rights Measures, 1950 to 1984, in Human Rights and Statistics: Getting the Record Straight,

supra note 12, at 198.

17. R?ssel L. Barsh, Measuring Human Rights: Problems of Methodology and Purpose, 15

Hum. Rts. Q. 87 (1993); Charles Humana, World Human Rights Guide (1983; 1986; 1992). 18. Susan Mendus, Human Rights in Political Theory, 43 Pol. Stud. (Special Issue) 10 (1995). 19. This is based on a tabulation of international human rights instruments. Scott Davidson,

Human Rights 193-96 (1993); Maria Green, What We Talk about When We Talk about

Indicators: Current Approaches to Human Rights Measurement, 23 Hum. Rts. Q. 1062, 1968-70 (2001 ) show that there are over sixty rights that ought to be protected, including civil, political, economic, social, cultural, and solidarity rights. Despite these attempts to

enumerate human rights, there remains some doubt as to the full content of many rights and lack of clarity with regard to state obligation for their protection. The author is

grateful to Julia H?usermann for this valuable insight. 20. Joseph E. P?rsico, Nuremberg: Infamy on Trial (1994).

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2004 Measuring Human Rights 911

the Former Yugoslavia and Rwanda, and the more than twenty truth and

reconciliation commissions (TRCs) in Africa and Latin America,21 as well as

violation information that continues to be collected by governmental,

intergovernmental, and nongovernmental organizations. Fourth, patterns of violations mean that human rights are "more or less" protected in nation states and that this "more or less" can be measured in some fashion.

Taken together, these assumptions suggest that human rights can be measured in principle (i.e. as they are laid out in national and international

legal documents), in practice (i.e. as they are enjoyed by individuals and

groups in nation states), and as outcomes of government policy that has a

direct bearing on human rights protection.22 As will be shown below, measurement of human rights can take the form of coding country

participation in regional and international human rights regimes, coding national constitutions according to their rights provisions, qualitative report

ing of rights violations, survey data on perceptions of rights conditions,

quantitative summaries of rights violations, abstract scales of rights protec tion based on normative standards, and individual and aggregate measures

that map the outcomes of government policies that have consequences for the enjoyment of rights.

A. Rights in Principle

International and domestic law enshrines norms and principles of human

rights, which can be coded using protocols that reward a country for having certain rights provisions in place. Van Maarseveen and Van Der Tang set an

important precedent by coding constitutions for 157 countries across a

multitude of institutional and rights dimensions for the period 1 788-1975.23 Their study compares the degree to which national constitutions contain those rights mentioned in the UN Declaration for Human Rights by examining their frequency distributions across different historical epochs before and after 1948. Figure 1 shows the results of their comparisons for civil and political rights, while Figure 2 shows them for economic and social

rights. Their study is broadly descriptive in nature, but its data allow for

21. Priscilla B. Hayner, Fifteen Truth Commissions?1974 to 1994: A Comparative Study, 16 Hum. Rts. Q. 597 (1994); Priscilla B. Hayner, Unspeakable Truths: Facing the Challenge of Truth Commissions (2002).

22. International human rights lawyers would argue that the difference between principle and practice is the same as the difference between de jure protection of human rights and de facto realization.

23. Henc Van Maarseveen & Ger Van Der Tang, Written Constitutions: A Computerized Comparative Study ch. 6 (1978).

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912 HUMAN RIGHTS QUARTERLY Vol. 26

FIGURE 1

National Constitutional Provisions for Rights in Principle: Civil and Political Rights

120

>$4<'<:s&'*&' v <&* v*

^ y

Types of Rights

1788-1948 D 1949-1957 1958-1966 1967-1975

5ee Henc Van Maarseveen & G er Van Der Tang, Written Constitutions: A Computerized Comparative

Study 189-211 (1978).

FIGURE 2

National Constitutional Provisions for Rights in Principle: Economic and Social Rights

Types of Rights

11788-1948 D 1949-1957 I 1958-1966 I 1967-1975

Van Maarseveen & Van Der Tang, at 189-211.

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2004 Measuring Human Rights 913

global patterns and processes of change in the formal protection of rights to

be mapped, while secondary and more advanced statistical analysis could

be conducted.

Using an "institutional procedural index/' Foweraker and Landman

code rights in principle for Brazil, Chile, Mexico, and Spain using the

various national constitutions and constitutional amendments during the

years of political liberalization and democratic transitions.24 In both of these

studies, the authors are concerned with the formally declared commitment

to rights protection as it appears in national constitutions. More recently, Poe

and Keith have coded national constitutions to measure their ability to

suspend rights protection during states of emergency.25 At the global level,

Keith, Landman, and Hathaway code the regional and international human

rights regimes by scoring countries for signing and ratifying major human

rights instruments.26 Rather than code individual rights provisions, these

authors code the degree to which countries are parties to human rights treaties over time. Figure 4 shows the number of countries that have ratified

the main international human rights instruments for the period 1976-2000.27

Coding rights in principle, either at the national or international level is

24. Foweraker & Landman, supra note 11. See also Figure 3.

25. Steven C. Poe & Linda C Keith, Personal Integrity Abuse During Domestic Crises Paper

Prepared for the 98th Annual Meeting of the American Political Science Association, Boston (2002) (on file with author).

26. Keith, supra note 5; Landman, Protecting Human Rights, supra note 5; Hathaway, supra note 5.

27. These instruments include the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights, adopted 19 Dec. 1966, G.A. Res. 2200 (XXI), U.N. GAOR, 21st Sess., Supp. No. 16, U.N. Doc. A/6316 (1966), 999 U.N.T.S. 171 (entered into force 23 Mar. 1976) (ICCPR); International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights, adopted 19 Dec. 1966,

G.A. Res. 2200 (XXI), U.N. GAOR, 21st Sess., Supp. No. 16, U.N. Doc. A/6316 (1966), 993 U.N.T.S. 3 (entered into force 3 Jan. 1976) (ICESCR); the First and Second Optional Protocols to the ICCPR, Optional Protocol to the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights, adopted 16 Dec. 1966, G.A. Res. 2200A (XXI), U.N. GAOR, 21st Sess.,

Supp. No. 16, U.N. Doc. A/6316 (1966), 999 U.N.T.S. 171 (entered into force 23 Mar.

1976), reprinted in 6 I.L.M. 383 (1967); International Convention on the Elimination of

All Forms of Racial Discrimination, adopted 21 Dec. 1965, 660 U.N.T.S. 195 (entered into force 4 Jan. 1969), reprinted in 5 I.L.M. 352 (1966) (CERD); Convention on the

Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination Against Women, adopted 18 Dec. 1979, G.A.

Res. 34/180, U.N. GAOR, 34th Sess., Supp. No. 46, U.N. Doc. A/34/46 (1980) (entered into force 3 Sept. 1981), 1249 U.N.T.S. 13, reprinted in 19 I.L.M. 33 (1980) (CEDAW);

Convention Against Torture and Other Cruel, Inhuman or Degrading Treatment or

Punishment, adopted 10 Dec. 1984, G.A. Res. 39/46, U.N. GAOR, 39th Sess., Supp. No.

51, U.N. Doc. A/39/51 (1985) (entered into force 26 June 1987), reprinted in 23 I.L.M. 1027 (1984), substantive changes noted in 24 I.L.M. 535 (1985) (CAT); and the

Convention on the Rights of the Child, adopted 20 Nov. 1989, G.A. Res. 44/25, U.N.

GAOR, 44th Sess., Supp. No. 49, U.N. Doc. A/44/49 (1989) (entered into force 2 Sept. 1990), reprinted in 28 I.L.M. 1448 (1989) (CRC). See also Thomas Buercenthal, Interna tional Human Rights in a Nutshell (1995).

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914 HUMAN RIGHTS QUARTERLY Vol. 26

FIGURE 3

Rights in Principle in Brazil (1964-1990), Chile (1973-1990), Mexico (1963-1990), and Spain (1958-1983)

1.2

0.8

0.6

0.4

0.2

0

-0.2

- Brazil ? - Chile

-Mexico

-Spain

.-.J

xA^b^

Year

Joe Foweraker & Todd Landman, Citizenship Rights and Social Movements: A Comparative and Statistical

Analysis (1997).

important because it translates legal qualitative information into quantitative information that can be used to track the formal commitment of countries to

rights protection against which their actual practices can be compared. Foweraker and Landman use regression techniques to gauge the relative gap between rights in principle and rights in practice in Brazil, Chile, Mexico, and Spain.28 Their analysis demonstrates that during the process of political

liberalization, authoritarian states can deny rights that they proclaim are

protected (a negative gap), protect rights that they proclaim are protected (a zero gap), or protect rights that they proclaim are not protected (a positive

gap).29 Poe and Keith use their state of emergency variable to examine the

28. See Foweraker & Landman, supra note 11, at 62-65; see also R. Duvall & M. Shamir, Indicators from Errors: Cross-National, Time Serial Measures of the Repressive Disposi tion of Government, in Indicator Systems for Political, Economic, and Social Analysis 162-63

(Charles Lewis Taylor ed., 1980); Zehra F. Arat, Democracy and Human Rights in Developing

Countries (1991). 29. Interestingly, such a gap merely identifies the degree to which a regime complies with its

formal commitments and nothing about the regime type itself. For example, "a

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2004 Measuring Human Rights 915

FIGURE 4

Mapping Treaty Ratification

1976 1977 1978 1979 19801981 19821983 1984 198519861987 1988 1989 1990 1991 199219931994 1995 19961997 1998 1999 2000

Year

ICESCR-ICCPR.OPT1 .OPT2-CERD-CEDAW.CAT -CRC

Landman 2001.

relationship between the law and practice of human rights while controlling for the independent effects of democracy, wealth, and warfare.30 Using the

notions of principle and practice for global analysis shows that regimes

frequently make formal commitments to human rights treaties but continue

to violate human rights. This difference is captured by weak positive or even

negative correlation and regression coefficients between ratification and

rights variables.31 Carrying out such analyses, however, requires measure

ment of rights in practice to which the discussion now turns.

totalitarian polity with no rights protection and much repression, and a democratic polity with full rights protection and complete liberty may both have a zero GAP." See

Foweraker & Landman, supra note 11, at 63. Zanger tests the relationship between regime

type and human rights protection and finds that even the first year of a democratic

transition reduces the degree to which personal integrity rights are violated. See Zanger, supra note 9.

30. Poe & Keith, supra note 25.

31. Keith, supra note 5; Landman, Protecting Human Rights, supra note 5; Hathaway, supra note 5; see also Stephen D. Krasner, Sovereignty: Organized Hypocrisy 122 (1999).

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916 HUMAN RIGHTS QUARTERLY Vol. 26

B. Rights in Practice

Rights in practice are those rights actually enjoyed and exercised by groups and individuals regardless of the formal commitment made by a govern ment. While there ought to be a correspondence between formal rights commitments found in national constitutions and international human rights instruments and those enjoyed on the ground, it is often the case that

individuals and groups do not enjoy the full protection of their rights (a

negative gap in the terminology used above). Ideally, there ought to be in

place a legal appeals procedure, mechanisms for seeking domestic and

international remedies, and a subsequent correction in national practices to

uphold the rights to which regimes have made formal commitments.32 In the

absence of such systems or in the face of weak systems, the role of many human rights practitioners is to provide meaningful and accurate informa

tion on the degree to which human rights are being violated. Indeed, greater concerns over humans rights since World War II has led to an explosion in

the number of domestic and international human rights NGOs collecting information on violations.33 Such NGOs have been given greater status in

international governmental organizations, and their activities include setting

standards, providing information, lobbying, and giving direct assistance to

those suffering abuse of their rights.34 The increase in the salience of human rights as an issue combined with

organizations dedicated to documenting human rights violations means that

32. There is a certain functionalist logic at work here, which suggests that a gap between

principle and practice is somehow acted upon and the national system responds to re

equilibrate the relationship between citizens and the state. Interestingly, human rights scholars have argued that social mobilization at the national level and activities carried

out by actors embedded in so-called "transnational advocacy networks" are the forces

for such re-equilibration. 5ee Foweraker & Landman, supra note 11 ; Joe Foweraker & Todd

Landman, Individual Rights and Social Movements: A Comparative and Statistical

Inquiry, 29 Brit. J. Pol. Sci. 291 (1999); Thomas Risse et al., The Power of Human Rights:

International Norms and Domestic Change (1999); Darren Hawkins, International Human

Rights and Authoritarian Rule in Chile (2002). 33. While it is nearly impossible to count the number of domestic human rights NGOs

around the world, it is estimated that there are about 250 such organizations active

across borders. See Union of International Associations, available afwww.uia.org; Jackie

Smith et al., Globalizing Human Rights: The Work of Transnational Human Rights NGOs

in the 1990s, 20 Hum. Rts Q. 379 (1998). 34. In addition to Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch, the International

Federation of Human Rights, available at www.fidh.org, and the World Organisation

Against Torture, available aiwww.omct.org, have developed systems for monitoring and

tabulating human abuses against individuals and human rights defenders as well as

making targeted appeals on behalf of victims of human rights abuses. 5ee David Forsythe,

Human Rights in International Relations 163-90 (2000); Claude E. Welch, Jr., NGOs and

Human Rights: Promise and Performance 1-6 (2001).

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2004 Measuring Human Rights 917

there is greater availability of comprehensive information on actual prac tices of states and the conditions under which individuals live. But this

information necessarily will be lumpy and incomplete because reporting of

human rights violations is fraught with difficulties, including fear within

victims, power of the offenders, comprehensive evidence, and quality of

communications technology, among others. In recognizing this problem, Bollen has argued that there are six levels of information on human rights violations.35 The most ideal level is that of all characteristics (either reported or unreported), followed by recorded violations, known and accessible

violations, locally reported violations (nation-state), internationally reported

violations, and the most biased coverage of violations, which may include

those reported in US sources.

Work in this area seeks to obtain lower levels of information in much

greater detail. For example, the Torture Reporting Handbook/6 and Report

ing Killings as Human Rights Violations,37 are manuals that define specific

rights, outline the legal protections against their violation, and provide ways in which testimony and evidence from victims can be collected.38 The

Human Rights Information and Documentation System (HURIDOCS), founded in 1982, provides standards for human rights violations reporting, and now represents a vast network of human rights groups.39 While such

increased information at all levels is helpful for systematic human rights

research, there remains a tradeoff or tension between micro levels of

information gathering and the ability to make systematic comparative inferences about human rights. In order for equivalent measures to "travel"

for comparative analysis, there will necessarily be some loss of information, while the comparability of measures allows for stronger generalizations about human rights violations to be drawn.40

These issues about levels of information and the commensurability for

35. Bollen, supra note 16, at 198; see also Figure 5.

36. Camille Giffard, Torture Reporting Handbook (2002), available at www.essex.ac.uk/ torturehandbook.

37. Kate Thompson & Camille Giffard, Reporting Killings as Human Rights Violations (2002). 38. Both of these manuals are published by the Human Rights Centre at the University of

Essex.

39. For up to date information on the activities of and groups involved with HURIDOCS, see

available aiwww.huridocs.org; Judith Dueck, HURIDOCS Standard Formats as a Tool in

the Documentation of Human Rights Violations, in Human Rights and Statistics: Getting the

Record Straight, supra note 12, at 127.

40. For a treatment of this trade-off between levels of abstraction and the scope of countries

under comparison, see Todd Landman, Issues and Methods in Comparative Politics: An

Introduction (2000); Todd Landman, Comparative Politics and Human Rights, 25 Hum.

Rts. Q. (2002); Todd Landman, Issues and Methods in Comparative Politics: An Introduction

(2d ed. 2003).

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918 HUMAN RIGHTS QUARTERLY Vol. 26

FIGURE 5

Bollen's Levels of Human Rights Information and Reporting

All characteristics (recorded and unrecorded)

Recorded

Accessible

Locally reported

Internationally reported

US Reported

BIASED

See Kenneth A. Bollen, Political Rights and Political Liberties in Nations: An Evaluation of

Rights Measures, 1950 to 1984, in Human Rights and Statistics: Getting the Record Straight 198

(1992).

comparative analysis delineate the three types of data available for measur

ing human rights in practice: (1) events-based, (2) standards-based, and (3)

survey-based. Events-based data chart the reported acts of violation com

mitted against groups and individuals. Events-based data answer the

important questions of what happened, when it happened, and who was

involved, and then report descriptive and numerical summaries of the

events. Counting such events and violations involves identifying the various acts of commission and omission that constitute or lead to human rights violations, such as extra-judicial killings, arbitrary arrest, or torture. Such

data tend to be disaggregated to the level of the violation itself, which may have related data units such as the perpetrator, the victim, and the witness.41

Standards-based data establish how often and to what degree violations

occur, and then translate such judgements into quantitative scales that are

designed to achieve commensurability. Such measures are thus one level

removed from event counting and violation reporting, and merely apply an

ordinal scale to qualitative information. Finally, survey-based data use

random samples of country populations to ask a series of standard questions

41. Making the Case: Investigating Large Scale Human Rights Violations Using Information Systems and Data Analysis (Patrick Ball et al. eds., 2000).

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2004 Measuring Human Rights 919

on the perception of rights protection. Such measures track individual level

perceptions or rights violations.42

These different types of data map overall human rights practices within

a country in different ways. The HURIDOCS project, handbooks such as

those on torture43 and unlawful killings,44 and the work of nationally based

human rights commissions collect events-based data, which can provide time-series and continuous indicators on human rights violations. Standards

based scales such as the "political terror scale/45 the "index of political

freedom/'46 the torture scale,47 "the minorities at risk" project,48 and the

"state failure project,"49 use available information on human rights practices of states to generate global indices. Finally, survey-based data on rights can

be found in such studies as the Eurobarometer (and now World Barometer) series and the World Values Survey.50 Physicians for Human Rights has

begun doing surveys of "at risk" populations in Afghanistan, Sierra Leone, and Iraq to measure the degree to which certain sectors of society (internally

displaced people, women, and Shi'ites) experience human rights abuses. In

addition, governments themselves have begun conducting mass public

opinion surveys on individual perceptions of human rights. For example, the Home Office in the United Kingdom commissioned a citizenship survey,

which contains a series of questions on the Human Rights Act of 1998 and

general questions about rights and duties of UK citizens.51

42. It is equally possible to interview random samples of populations to probe the degree to

which individuals have actually experienced human rights violations. Such a method is

fraught with difficulties because individuals may not respond to such questions owing to

fear, intimidation, and the possibility of recrimination. In contrast, the individual-level data collected by truth commissions, human rights commissions, and NGOs rely on

"convenience samples" of those individuals willing to come forward and volunteer information regarding violations that have occurred to them or those that they have

witnessed.

43. Giffard, supra note 36.

44. Thompson & Giffard, supra note 37.

45. See, e.g., Poe & T?te, supra note 4.

46. Freedom House, Freedom in the World: Political and Civil Liberties, 1989-1990 (1990). 47. Hathaway, supra note 5.

48. Theodore Gurr, Why Minorities Rebel: A Cross National Analysis of Communal

Mobilization and Conflict Since 1945, 14 Int'l Pol. Sci. Rev. 161 (1993). 49. Daniel C Esty et al., The State Failure Project: Early Warning Research for US Foreign

Policy Planning, in Preventive Measures: Building Risk Assessment and Crisis Early Warning

Systems 2 (John L. Davies & Ted R. Gurr eds., 1998). 50. Ronald Inglehart, The Silent Revolution: Changing Values and Political Styles among Western

Publics (1977); Ronald Inglehart, Culture Shift in Advanced Industrial Societies (1990); Ronald

Inglehart, Modernization and Postmodernization (1997); Ronald Inglehart, Political Values, in Comparative Politics: The Problem of Equivalence (Jan W. Van Deth ed., 1998).

51. Home Office of the United Kingdom, 2001 Home Office Citizenship Survey: People, Families and

Communities, Home Office Research Study 270 (2001), available afwww.homeoffice.gov.uk.

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920 HUMAN RIGHTS QUARTERLY Vol. 26

FIGURE 6

Events Data from the Pinochet Years (1979-1986): Intimidation and Harassment; Torture and Mistreatment

2000

1800

1600

1400

_ 1200 z

? 1000 CD > LU 800

600

400

200

0

- Intimidation/Harassment

Torture/Mistreatment

1979 1980 1981 1982 1983

Year

1984 1985 1986

See Randy B. Reiter et al., Guidelines for Field Reporting of Basic Human Rights Violations, in

Human Rights and Statistics: Getting the Record Straight 116-20 (1992).

Figures 6, 7, and 8 provide examples of the three different types of data

depicting rights in practice. Figure 6 is an example of events-based data for

state practices under the Pinochet regime in Chile from 1979 to 1986. The

information for the data came from the Chilean Human Rights Commission,52 and the figure depicts the number of reported instances of harassment and

intimidation on the one hand, and torture and mistreatment on the other.

Figure 7 shows the abstract measures of civil and political rights from

Freedom House, personal integrity rights, and torture in the world between

1976 and 2000. Freedom House has a standard checklist it uses to code

civil and political rights based on press reports and country sources about

state practices and then derives a scale that ranges from one (full protection)

52. Randy B. Reiter et al., Guidelines for Field Reporting of Basic Human Rights Violations, in Human Rights and Statistics: Getting the Record Straight, supra note 12, at 90.

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2004 Measuring Human Rights 921

FIGURE 7

Standards-based Measures for the World 1976-2000

3.5

v 2.5

1.5

,?* S

S N ^

-FH Political Rights - FH Civil Rights

? - Torture Scale (Hathaway) -Amnesty PIR -State Department PIR

i-1-1-1-1-1-1-1-1-1-1-1-1-1-1-1-i-1-1-1-1-1-1-1

Year

to seven (full violation).53 The personal integrity rights measures are abstract

scales that range from one (full protection) to five (full violation) for state

practice that include torture, political imprisonment, unlawful killing, and

disappearance. Information for these scales comes from the US State

53. The checklist for political liberties includes chief authority recently elected by a

meaningful process; legislature recently elected by a meaningful process; fair election

laws, campaigning opportunity, polling, and tabulation; fair reflection of voter prefer ence in the distribution of power; multiple political parties; recent shifts in power

through elections; significant opposition vote; free of military or foreign control; major groups or groups allowed reasonable self-determination; decentralized political power; and informal consensus, de facto opposition power. The checklist for civil liberties

includes media and literature free of political censorship; open public discussion; freedom of assembly and demonstration; freedom of political or quasi-political organiza tion; nondiscriminatory rule of law in politically relevant cases; freedom from unjustified

political terror or imprisonment; free trade unions, peasant organizations, or equivalent; free businesses or cooperatives; free professional or other private organizations; free

religious institutions; personal social rights; and socioeconomic rights. See Raymond D.

Gastil, Freedom in the World: Political and Civil Liberties, 1988-1989 (1989); Raymond D.

Gastil, Freedom in the World: Political and Civil Liberties, 1986-1987 (1987); Raymond D.

Gastil, The Comparative Survey of Freedom: Experiences and Suggestions, 25 Stud.

Comp. Int'l Dev. 25 (1990); Freedom House, supra note 46; see also available at www.

freedomhouse.org/research/freeworld/2000/methodology.

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922 HUMAN RIGHTS QUARTERLY Vol. 26

FIGURE 8

World Values Survey (1994) Question on Support for the Idea of Human Rights in 1990 Across Eight Countries (1002

< N < 2095)

96

94

92

90

88

86

84 ]'?:

82 J?I-1?,?I-1??J-1?:??-1??I-1??I-1?,?I-1?,?I France UK Germany Netherlands USA Mexico Brazil Chile

Country

Department and Amnesty International country reports.54 In similar fashion,

Hathaway measures torture on a one to five scale using information from

the US State Department.55 Finally, Figure 8 shows the frequency response on the "support for human rights'' question contained in the World Values

Survey, which interviewed random samples of individuals from forty-three societies between 1981 and 1990. On this particular question, which was

posed in the 1990 survey, there were responses from eight countries.

Although this article has focused primarily on the measurement of civil

and political rights, it is possible to extend the methodological discussion to

include the measurement of economic, social, and cultural rights. Despite the common plea for all human rights to be indivisible (as reinforced, for

example, by the 1993 Vienna Declaration and Programme for Action),56

many human rights scholars continue to argue that civil and political rights

54. Poe & T?te, supra note 4.

55. Hathaway, supra note 5.

56. Vienna Declaration and Programme of Action, U.N. GAOR, World Conf. on Hum. Rts., 48th Sess., 22d plen. mtg., part I, U.N. Doc. A/CONF.157/24 (1993), reprinted in 32

I.L.M. 1661 (1993).

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2004 Measuring Human Rights 923

are negative rights (i.e., what the state should not do), while economic,

social, and (most) cultural rights are positive rights (i.e., what the state

should do).57 This division between positive and negative rights has

influenced the methodological discussion concerning their measurement.

Following this division explicitly or implicitly, scholars have argued that

it is hard to measure economic, social, and cultural rights since their

progressive realization relies on the fiscal capacity of the state for which no

comparable measures are possible.58 But if the denial of economic, social, and cultural rights is the product of particular government practices, then it

is seems equally possible to use qualitative information to summarize such

practices into ordinal scales similar to those used for civil and political

rights. Overt, institutionalized, or implicit discrimination against individuals or groups that prevents their access to education or adequate health

constitutes a practice that violates a right. In theory, such a violation can be

reported and coded using events-based, standards-based, or survey-based data. The minorities at risk project codes the degree to which 337 different

minority and communal groups experience discrimination using such

ordinal scales.59

Despite their development and increasingly wider use these three types of data (events-based, standards-based, and survey-based) are fraught with

methodological problems. Events-based data are prone to either under

reporting of events that did occur or over-reporting of events that did not

occur, creating problems of selection bias and misrepresenting data. It is

impossible to document every human rights violation, and those organiza tions collecting such information tend to concentrate on conflict-stricken

societies during discrete periods of time, and thus cross-country compari sons using such measures is problematic.

In contrast, standards-based data establish comparability by raising the

level of abstraction but have a tendency to truncate the variation of human

rights protection across different countries. In other words, their use of a

simple limited scale may group together certain countries that actually show a great difference in their protection of human rights. While these scales

present a general picture of the human rights situation and are useful for

drawing comparative inferences, they necessarily sacrifice the kind of

specificity for pursuing direct legal action against perpetrators.

Finally, survey data, especially those used across different political contexts, are prone to cultural biases, where the meaning of standardized

57. Davidson, supra note 19; Peter Jones, Rights (1995). 58. Foweraker & Landman, supra note 11 ; Keith, supra note 5.

59. Joe Foweraker & Roman Krznaric, Measuring Liberal Democratic Performance: A

Conceptual and Empirical Critique, 48 Pol. Stud. 759 (2000); Gurr, supra note 48.

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924 HUMAN RIGHTS QUARTERLY Vol. 26

questions on rights protection are differently understood in different countries.

In this way, the debate about the universality of human rights affects the

method of measuring rights through surveys since it is not obvious that

human rights are understood to mean the same thing across the world.60 It

is important therefore that those measuring human rights in practice

recognize the limits of their data.

C. Government Policies and Outcomes

In addition to rights in principle and rights in practice, it is possible to

provide more indirect measures of human rights using aggregate statistics on

the outcomes of government policies. In her contribution to a 2001

conference on human rights impact assessment, Fukuda-Parr makes the

useful distinction between human rights conduct and developmental outcomes that may have a bearing on human rights.61 She stresses the fact

that certain dimensions of conduct and outcomes are simply not prone to

quantifiable measurement.62 In the language of this present article, her

distinction fits well with the difference between rights in practice (conduct) and government policy (outcomes).

In contrast, however, this article argues that practices and outcomes are

more readily quantifiable than Fukuda-Parr assumes.63 The discussion in the

60. Anthropologists, sociologists, and political scientists who adopt culturalist perspectives have long grappled with these issues. On the one hand, the sceptics argue that there are

limits to cross-cultural and transnational understandings of human rights, and any

attempt to measure them using a survey instrument will necessarily fail. See Alasdair C

MacIntyre, Against the Self-Images of the Age: Essays on Ideology and Philosophy 260-79

(1971 ). On the other hand, there are those who argue that cross-cultural measurement of

human rights is possible since there are "homeomorphic equivalents" of rights that can

be probed using social scientific methods. See also Alison D. Renteln, International Human

Rights: Universalism Versus Relativism (1990). Indeed, in political science, comparative scholars have long been measuring popular attitudes toward government, political

institutions, and the degree to which citizens can participate effectively in governmental

processes. The Civic Culture Revisited (Gabriel Almond & Sidney Verba eds., 1989);

Inglehart, The Silent Revolution, supra note 50; Inglehart, Culture Shift in Advanced Industrial

Societies, supra note 50; Inglehart, Modernization and Postmodernization, supra note 50;

Inglehart, Political Values, supra note 50. In many cases, they identify "functional

equivalents" across different governmental institutions in order to allow for cross-cultural

comparison. See aIso Mattei Dogan & Dominique P?lassy, How to Compare Nations: Strategies

in Comparative Politics (2d ed. 1990); Landman, Issues and Methods in Comparative Politics,

supra note 40; Landman, Comparative Politics and Human Rights, supra note 40.

61. Sakiko Fukuda-Parr, Indicators of Human Rights and Human Development: Overlaps and Differences, 2 Stat. J. UN Econ. Comm. 239-48 (2001).

62. Marike Radstaake & Daan Bronkhorst, Matching Practice with Principles, Human Rights Impact

Assessment: EU Opportunities 31-32 (2002). 63. Fukuda-Parr, supra note 61.

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2004 Measuring Human Rights 925

preceding section demonstrated that human rights scholars have long been

measuring rights in practice, albeit with a greater emphasis on civil and

political rights. Qualitative information on the degree to which certain

categories of rights have been violated is either summarized quantitatively (events data), translated into comparable quantitative ordinal scales (stan

dards-based data), or acquired through individual level data collection

techniques (survey-based data).

Traditionally, development studies and development economics have

often relied on quantitative indicators of the outcomes of government

policies, including gross domestic product, gross domestic product per

capita, income inequality, and expenditure on health, education, and

welfare, among many others.64 Indeed, the UNDP's human development index (HDI) combines per capita income (standard of living) with literacy rates (knowledge), and life expectancy at birth (longevity).65 While not

providing a direct measure of rights protection per se, such measures can

elucidate the degree to which governments support activities that have an

impact on human rights. In addition, development indicators have been

increasingly employed as proxy measures the progressive realization of

economic, social, and cultural rights. Article 2 of the International Covenant on Economic, Social and

Cultural Rights requires states to take steps, to the maximum of their

available resources, towards the progressive realization of these rights; steps that states use to set goals, targets, and time frames for national plans to

implement these rights.66 Development indicators are thus seen as suitable

proxy measures to capture the degree to which states are implementing these obligations. For example, literacy rates and gender breakdown of

educational attainment are seen as proxy measures of the right to education;

daily per capita supply of calories and other nutritional rates are seen as

proxy measures of the right to food; and under-five mortality rates and the

numbers of doctors per capita are seen as proxy measures of the right to

health.67

To date, development indicators have primarily been applied to

economic and social rights, but aggregate statistics can equally be used to

measure civil and political rights. Following the work of the United States

Agency for International Development (USAID) new efforts propose the use

64. The World Bank has over 500 separate indicators for the whole world for the period 1960 to the present, available aiwww.worldbank.org for information to its on-line world

development indicators (WDI) database.

65. United Nations Development Programme (UNDP), Human Development Report 127-37 (1999). 66. ICESCR, supra note 27, art. 2.

67. Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights, Draft Guidelines on a Human Rights

Approach to Poverty Reduction Strategies (Paul Hunt et al. eds., 2002).

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926 HUMAN RIGHTS QUARTERLY Vol. 26

of development indicators as potential proxy measures for civil and political

rights.68 For example, investment in prison and police reform, the processing of cases, and the funding of judiciaries are all seen as proxy measures for

state commitment to upholding civil and political rights. The extension of

such indicators for measuring cultural rights is also possible. The social and

spatial mobility of ethnic and cultural minority populations, as well as

spending on bilingual education can approximate the degree to which

countries are adopting policies that uphold their cultural rights obligations. In short, aggregate measures of provision can depict the degree to which

governments are committed to putting in place the kinds of resources

needed to have a "rights-protective regime" in place.69

IV. SUMMARY AND IMPLICATIONS

This final section reviews the degree to which work has been carried out in

providing human rights measures across their different dimensions and

considers four main implications for continued work in this area. This article

has argued that the measurement of human rights is vital for continued

vigilance on human rights abuses, and it relies on careful documentation of

such abuses, and it can operationalize different categories of human rights for systematic analysis. It has shown that human rights can be measured in

principle, in practice, and as outcomes of policy. Table 1 summarizes these

three modes of measurement with one column for each and with separate rows for definitions of each mode, general descriptions of relevant indica

tors, and specific descriptions of indicators broken down across the different

categories of human rights. Various efforts to date have produced measures

for the different cells in the table, where some cells have received more

attention owing to differences in intellectual interests, availability of

information, and tractability of measurement problems.

A. Principle, Practice and Policy

Rights in principle can be measured by translating qualitative legal informa

tion into quantitative information, and to date, such efforts have coded the

nonparticipation, signature, and full ratification of countries across the

68. USAID, Democracy and Governance: A Conceptual Framework (1998), available at www.

usaid.gov/democracy/pubsindex; USAID, Handbook of Democracy and Governance Pro gram Indicators (1998), available afwww.usaid.gov/democracy/pubsindex.

69. Jack Donnelly, Human Rights, Democracy and Development, 21 Hum. Rts. Q. 608

(1999).

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2004 Measuring Human Rights 927

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928 HUMAN RIGHTS QUARTERLY Vol. 26

major international human rights treaties70 as well as coded national constitutions for rights provisions.71 At the international level, work still

needs to be done on the relative weight of each treaty, the role for

reservations held by individual countries and the conditions under which

countries exercise their rights to derogation.72 At the national level, continued work is needed on the coding and assessment of constitutions for

their rights provisions and the conditions under which rights can be

suspended. Moreover, in the post-September 11 world, continued work is

needed on the degree to which states have enhanced their national security doctrines to the detriment of basic rights protections. For example, the

United Sates, Germany, and the United Kingdom have all passed new

legislation that gives greater power and authority to national security institutions while undermining human rights.73

Rights in practice, and especially civil and political rights, have

received the most attention to date, with numerous abstract scales of rights

protection generated from qualitative rights reporting. The index of freedom

produced by Freedom House has the most comprehensive coverage over

time and across space but has been subject to widespread criticism for its

continued opacity and ideological biases.74 The measures of personal

integrity rights violations have over the years shown reasonably high inter

coder reliability, and the five-point scale that they use has been adopted to

cover other areas including torture, women's rights, and workers' rights.75

70. Keith, supra note 5; Bayefsky, supra note 1 ; Landman, Measuring the International Human

Rights Regime, supra note 1; Landman, Measuring Human Rights and the Impact of

Human Rights Policy, supra note 1; Landman, The Economic Requirements of Democ

racy, supra note 1; Landman, Protecting Human Rights, supra note 5; Hathaway, supra note 5.

71. Van Maarseveen & Van Der Tang, supra note 23; Foweraker & Landman, supra note 11 ; Poe

& Keith, supra note 25.

72. Hathaway, supra note 5.

73. For an analysis of the trade-off between security and rights in the United Kingdom, see

International IDEA Handbook on Democracy Assessment (David Beetham et al. edsv 2002). 74. Despite its two checklists for civil and political rights, there is still some mystery as to

how information collected using the checklists is ultimately converted into the 1-7

scales. Moreover, throughout the period of coverage (1972-present), Freedom House

either underestimates rights abuses in certain parts of the world or overestimates them in

others, and it tends to reward countries for economic freedom. See Todd Landman, Economic Development and Democracy: The View From Latin America, 47 Pol. Stud.

607 (1999); Foweraker & Krznaric, supra note 59; Gerardo Munck, Conceptualizing and

Measuring Democracy: Evaluating Alternative Ideas, 35 Comp. Pol. Stud. 5 (2002). 75. Hathaway, supra note 5; Stephen C. Poe et al., Global Patterns in the Achievement of

Women's Human Rights to Equality, 19 Hum. Rts. Q. 813 (1997); David Cingranelli &

Chang-yen Tsai, Democracy, Workers' Rights and Income Inequality: A Comparative Cross-national Analysis, paper prepared for the 98th Annual Meeting of the American

Political Science Association, Boston (2002) (on file with author); Poe & T?te, supra note

4; Gibney et al., supra note 6; Poe et al., supra note 4.

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2004 Measuring Human Rights 929

Despite the validity of these measures, their relative crudeness does little to

differentiate rights protection across the advanced industrial countries, while mapping the more salient differences in rights protection between the

global North and South.

Measures of political rights necessarily overlap with measures of

democracy, which are too numerous to mention here, but the most widely used measures include Vanhanen's index of democratization and the Polity IV set of institutional measures of democracy and autocracy.76 There is the

further problem that rights scales are being used for measures of democracy and democracy scales for measures of human rights thereby conflating and

confusing two concepts that overlap only partially.77 Finally, while the minorities at risk project measures discrimination against minorities, little work to date has appeared on measuring general levels of discrimination in such areas as health and education.

Measuring the outcomes of policy has mostly focused on aggregate indicators of socioeconomic performance, while more lateral thinking is

needed on how such indicators can be used to demonstrate outcomes that have an impact on civil and political rights. The Union of International Associations provides quite detailed information and aggregate statistics on

international and national NGOs, which could arguably depict the density of national and international civil society as well as the degree to which states protect the right to assembly and association.78 In addition, they provide aggregate statistics on country membership in IGOs, which recent

comparative research demonstrates has a dampening effect on involvement in international conflict.79

A final example demonstrates how many of the measures outlined in this article have been combined to examine whether international human

rights treaties make a difference. Hathaway combines the concepts and

analytical categories from international law, international relations, and

76. Tat? Vanhanen, The Emergence of Democracy: A Comparative Study of 119 States, 1850-1979

(1984); Tatu Vanhanen, The Process of Democratization: A Comparative Study of 147 States, 1980-1988 (1990); Tatu Vanhanen, The Prospects of Democracy (1997); Keith Jaggers &

Theodore R. Gurr, Tracking Democracy's Third Wave with the Polity III Data, 32 J. Peace Res. 469 (1995); see also Foweraker & Krznaric, supra note 59.

77. Landman, Economic Development and Democracy, supra note 63; Foweraker &

Krznaric, supra note 59; David Beetham, Democracy and Human Rights 91-114 (1999). 78. Data on INGOs, IGOs, and NGOs is available at www.uia.org; Constructing World

Culture (John Boli & George M. Thomas eds., 1999). 79. Research currently being conducted by this author shows that membership in IGOs is

highly correlated with human rights treaty ratification and overall levels in the protection of civil and political rights. Bruce M. Russett & John R. O'Neal, Triangulating Peace:

Democracy, Interdependence and International Organizations (2001); Bruce Russett et al., The Third Leg of the Kantian Tripod for Peace: International Organizations and Militarized

Disputes, 1950-85, 52 Int'l Org. 441 (1998).

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930 HUMAN RIGHTS QUARTERLY Vol. 26

comparative politics.80 She uses measures of human rights in principle (international human rights law coded by country participation), human

rights in practice (standardized measures of genocide and torture), and

human rights outcomes (women's representation in national parliaments). She then conducts bivariate and multivariate statistical analysis and finds

mixed results on the empirical relationships between country participation in human rights treaties and country performance on her different measures

of rights in practice. While the overall causal relationship between rights in

principle and rights in practice remains problematic and in need of further

research, Hathaway's study represents a significant advance in the statistical

analysis of human rights protection.81

B. Implications and the Way Forward

The issues raised in this article are important for the future of human rights

protection, advocacy, and education, and it is hoped that their discussion

points the way forward for work in this area. While great advances in the

measurement and analysis of human rights have been made and serious

lacunae remain, there are three important implications for future work that

are drawn from the preceding discussion. First, all human rights measure

ment relies primarily on a base of information. There is thus a continued

need for the generation of high quality information at the lowest level of

aggregation, suggesting an important role for NGOs, IGOs, academics, and

government commissions devoted to documenting and measuring human

rights. Those tools developed for documenting gross violations need to be

extended and expanded to include less salient violations across all catego ries of human rights.

Second, there is a great need to share all available information. While

the advent of the Internet has greatly increased the ability to share

information on human rights, there is still a massive digital divide between

the North and South. Closing the divide through investment in the necessary infrastructure and educational systems can increase our ability to share

information. The need for sharing information must be complemented by an

ethos of replication, where the production of new human rights measures

should be discussed openly and made available as soon as possible.

Monitoring, measuring, and documentation techniques developed in the

South need to be shared with the North and vice versa.

80. Hathaway, supra note 5.

81. Id.

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2004 Measuring Human Rights 931

Third, there is obviously the need for continued funding of data

collection efforts and that human rights measurement entails a long-term investment on the part of the international and national actors. Further

development of domestic and international groups documenting and

measuring human rights is vital. Donor governments and donor agencies should dedicate resources to enhancing the ability to measure human rights across time and space and not to allow such measurement efforts to be

driven by narrow development agendas. Taken together, these implications suggest that international and na

tional actors in the field of human rights have much to contribute in the way of documenting and measuring human rights. Measurement is an imprecise science but is one that is nonetheless useful for mapping human rights

developments in the world, examining the plausible explanations for the

continued global variation in their protection, and providing policy solu

tions for improving that protection in the future.

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