How do we measure countries’ human rights performance?

Economic and social rights | Civil and political rights | Private sector dataset

What gets measured, gets improved.

The Human Rights Measurement Initiative (HRMI) works to provide robust, comprehensive measurements to track the human rights performance of countries.

We are working towards measuring all human rights contained in international treaties and other important documents. To begin with, we have developed two different measurement methodologies for two key sets of rights: economic and social rights and civil and political rights.

Our measurements of these rights are published on the Rights Tracker.

Our methodologies are distinctive in four ways:

We use co-design

We use co-design to develop our methodologies. We invite a wide range of people to contribute their concerns, ideas, and experience to the design process. Crucially, our methodologies are shaped by both human rights defenders, and human rights measurement academics.

This leads to robust methodologies that are widely accepted both in the human rights practitioner community, and among scholars.

This also helps to shift power away from white, Western perspectives and people – this is an ongoing process we are committed to.

We measure human rights as expressed in international law

Many useful monitoring and measuring tools shine a light on different parts of social and government behaviour.

Our unique contribution is to focus on the human rights obligations of countries, and measure how well they are meeting them. We use the rights definitions contained in international human rights treaties and related documents that have been agreed upon by all signatory countries.

We measure economic and social rights as laid out in the International Covenant on Economic, Social, and Cultural Rights, and civil and political rights as laid out in the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights. We also refer to related treaties such as the Convention on Torture, and General Comments of treaty bodies.

We produce numbers

Our measurements are in clear numbers, so it’s easy to see progress and deterioration over time. Our methodologies provide scores that are comparable between countries, and over time. These comparisons are available on the Rights Tracker.

We are independent and non-profit

Many diplomatic and government bodies find it difficult to speak clearly about the human rights situation in a country.

We are entirely independent of all governments; and we are a non-profit research collective. Our only motivation is to produce useful, robust measurement tools that others can use in their work to improve people’s lives.

Our data are freely available on the Rights Tracker. The data are published annually on the Rights Tracker, and the dataset is available to download.

All content is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Non-Commercial 4.0 International License. This means that you are free to use the data (with attribution to HRMI) for any non-commercial or journalistic purpose. If you would like to use the data for commercial purposes, please contact our partner organisation Rights Intelligence.

Measuring economic and social human rights

Our five economic and social human rights metrics are constructed from internationally comparable, publicly available, objective data, such as statistics on infant mortality and school enrolment. Our metrics show how each country is doing – on each of the five rights – relative to what is feasible for a country with that level of economic resources.

Economic and social human rights ensure that all people have access to the basic goods, services, and opportunities necessary to survive and thrive.

In international law, they can be summed up as discrimination-free access to an adequate standard of living, dignified employment, a minimum basic income, comprehensive health care, and extensive educational and cultural opportunities.

With a strong presence in the Universal Declaration and the core international human rights treaties, economic and social rights are equal in status and importance with civil and political rights.

What is unique about these measures compared with other indicators of economic development?

Our measures are based on a methodology that is unique in this area. It allows us to show how well the country is using its available resources to ensure all people enjoy these rights. We do this because under international law, a higher level of performance is expected from richer countries.

The Human Rights Measurement Initiative’s (HRMI’s) economic and social rights fulfilment measures are the only measures that:

Show how well each country is doing relative to what is feasible for a country with that level of economic resources.
Allow cross-country comparisons in rights fulfilment.
Provide an objective assessment of whether the overall situation regarding each economic and social right in a country is improving or deteriorating.
Provide a methodology to examine disparity in rights fulfilment between regions, or between racial, ethnic, gender, and other population sub-groups.

Our measures of economic and social rights

At this time, HRMI’s economic and social rights measures capture the fulfilment of five economic and social human rights:

Right to education
Right to food
Right to health
Right to housing
Right to work

Each of these is constructed from internationally-comparable, publicly-available objective data, such as statistics on infant mortality and school enrolment. They also take into account the fact that, as stated in Article 2 of the International Covenant on Economic, Social, and Cultural Rights (ICESCR), each country is obligated to progressively achieve economic and social rights “to the maximum of its available resources.” Essentially, this means that better performance is expected from richer countries.

Statistics such as school enrolment and infant mortality can help to tell us the extent to which individuals in each country enjoy economic and social rights. But it is not until the country’s GDP per capita is also taken into account that we can get a good sense of whether a state is complying with its obligations to progressively respect, protect, and fulfil those rights. These measures do just that.

This methodology, the Social and Economic Rights Fulfilment (SERF) Index, has been developed by Sakiko Fukuda-Parr, Terra Lawson-Remer, and Susan Randolph at the University of Connecticut. This approach is highly regarded by the human rights community. In 2016, a book detailing this methodology – Fulfilling Social and Economic Rights by Sakiko Fukuda-Parr, Terra Lawson-Remer, and Susan Randolph – won the American Political Science Association prize for the best book in human rights scholarship, and in 2019, the three authors were awarded the prestigious Grawemeyer Award for Ideas Improving World Order.

For more information you might like to watch Susan Randolph’s TED talk on measuring economic and social rights or read our detailed methodology handbook.

What data are available, for what years, and where can I find the data?

Measures for these five rights have been calculated for around 200 countries, depending on the right, going back 10 years. You can access them on our Rights Tracker website. The SERF Index Project also publishes these social and economic rights data on its website.

Using our calculator

We have developed a calculator tool so users can find scores that use our methodology for other sets of data using the same indicators.

For example, if you have access to data on a particular ethnic group’s rates of stunting or primary school enrolment, you can use the calculator to produce a score that you can compare with the country score we produce.

We would appreciate your feedback.

Population statistics

How many people would benefit if a country lifted its performance?

When a country is not meeting its obligations, and is scoring lower than 100% for a right, there will be a certain number of people who are missing out, whose lives would be improved if their country lifted its score.

Anyone can calculate these figures using population data, and the information on the Rights Tracker. We are seeking funding to be able to provide these calculations on the Rights Tracker for every country.

In the meantime, we have begun to provide these population statistics for some countries, such as India, in our Country Spotlights.

References

Fukuda-Parr, Sakiko, Terra Lawson-Remer and Susan Randolph. 2015. Fulfilling Social and Economic Rights. Oxford University Press.

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Measuring civil and political human rights

Our nine civil and political human rights metrics are based on information collected directly from human rights practitioners monitoring events in specific countries. We have developed a peer-reviewed methodology drawing on a multilingual survey of experts.

Civil and political human rights ensure your ability to live and to engage in religious, political, intellectual, or other activities free from coercion, abuse, or discrimination. We are currently measuring respect of the following 8 rights:

Right to Freedom from Arbitrary Arrest
Right to Freedom from Disappearance
Right to Freedom from the Death Penalty
Right to Freedom from Extrajudicial Execution
Right to Freedom from Torture

Right to Assembly and Association
Right to Opinion and Expression
Right to Participate in Government
Right to Freedom of Religion and Belief

Why measuring civil and political human rights is difficult

Civil and political human rights are fundamental, but difficult to measure. Violations of these rights often take place in secret and are denied by the people who order and carry them out. Often the violators attempt to place the blame for their actions on rogue agents or other actors. Indeed, the blame is often placed on the victims themselves, who are frequently described as radicals, criminals, or a threat to national security. Even when knowledge of violations is available, it is subject to uneven reporting by media, governments, and others. Previous measurement efforts have mostly based their measures on public documentation. However, this approach suffers from problems of undercounting, uncertainty, and bias.

Our solution to these challenges

At the Human Rights Measurement Initiative, our response to these challenges is to get information directly from the human rights researchers and practitioners who are monitoring events in each country. Since comprehensive objective data don’t exist, this is the best available source of information on civil and political rights globally. By feeding their knowledge into a comprehensive database, these human rights experts are growing the world’s knowledge and contributing to real improvements in people’s lives.

We gather information using an expert opinion survey, translated into many languages, designed to collect an unvarnished appraisal of human rights practices in the countries in which these human rights experts work. HRMI then uses this to construct measures that include a great deal more information than has previously been available, including data about human rights abuses that go unreported in public.

One of the strengths of this approach is that it lets us collect information from global, regional, national, and local organisations, giving us a diverse pool of perspectives. Another strength lies in our advanced statistical techniques for combining, and ensuring comparability across, responses. This allows us to produce data on civil and political rights that are comparable across countries, and to provide information on uncertainty, in the form of an uncertainty band around our measures.

Information is also collected about:

which groups in society are particularly vulnerable to abuses of each of the 14 rights;
specific circumstances in each country, such as the types of protests that were suppressed, or the geographical areas where violations occurred;
the degree to which the abuses described are being carried out by state versus non-state actors;
other issues as they arise, such as questions about pandemic responses in 2020.

Which countries do we measure civil and political rights in?

Every year we run the expert survey in more countries; in 2022 we are covering more than half the world’s population, across more than 40 countries, listed on our country coverage page.

If you would like us to produce these data for your country, please read about how we can partner together to make that possible.

The 2024 survey is available for you to see. [Please note this is a link to a preview of the survey only, and any responses you make will not be collected].

Who can be a survey respondent?

Survey respondents are human rights researchers and practitioners who are monitoring events in one of the survey countries. They must fit in one of the following categories:

Human rights expert (researcher, lawyer, other practitioner) monitoring human rights events in a survey country. They may be working for an international or domestic NGO or civil society organisation.
Journalists covering human rights issues in a survey country.
Staff working for the National Human Rights Institution (NHRI) of a survey country, if that NHRI is accredited with “A status” – meaning that it is fully compliant with the Paris Principles.

In most cases survey respondents are located within the country they are providing information on. For more closed countries we expect a higher proportion of external respondents.

We do not collect information from government officials or from staff working at government-organised NGOs, as they may have a conflict of interest.

Our priority is to seek respondents who have access to primary sources and are often the first points of contact for that information on the ground. For this reason, we do not seek usually academics as survey respondents.

Since we do not have the capacity to vet all potential survey respondents ourselves, we work through trusted partners, and a network of HRMI Ambassadors, who help to connect us to potential survey respondents who meet the above criteria.

We guard the identities of survey respondents very closely, so as not to place any of these individuals at risk for sharing their perception of events with us. We outline some of the security measures we take, and suggest participants take, in this article.

For more information, please see our Methodology Handbook and our article in the Journal of Human Rights:

“Human rights data for everyone: Introducing the Human Rights Measurement Initiative (HRMI)” Anne-Marie Brook, K Chad Clay, and Susan Randolph, in Journal of Human Rights, Volume 19, No 3 (2020), pp 67-82, available as a free PDF download.

“Using practitioner surveys to measure human rights: The Human Rights Measurement Initiative’s civil and political rights metrics” K Chad Clay, Ryan Bakker, Anne-Marie Brook, Daniel W Hill, Jr, and Amanda Murdie, in Journal of Peace Research, October 2020, available as a free PDF download.

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Measuring human rights for private sector use

Our partner organisation, Rights Intelligence, uses HRMI’s human rights data to create data and technology products for the business sector.

Rights Intelligence was launched to explore the opportunities for human rights data to support the private sector in stepping up their influence on country-level human rights.

To learn more about these products, check out the Rights Intelligence website and find out how the first product to market is created: the Rights Investor dataset.

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Resources

For much more detail, please see the HRMI methodology handbook.

Check out our Research Credentials and Publications.

FAQs about our methodologies can be found here and here.