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General Questions about HRMI

The Human Rights Measurement Initiative (HRMI) is a non-partisan initiative made up of academics and human rights practitioners from around the world. We share the goal of creating a world where all people can live their lives with dignity, regardless of who they are or where they live. We believe that societies tend to ‘measure what we treasure, and treasure what we measure’. As supporters of human rights, we believe that good measures of human rights will help us make faster progress.

Our goal is to provide comprehensive data on the human rights in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights and the United Nations’ core international human rights instruments. Developing a full suite of measures will take time and resources. We have begun by focusing on rights in the International Bill of Human Rights, i.e. the Universal Declaration, the International Covenant for Civil and Political Rights (ICCPR), and the International Covenant for Economic Social and Cultural rights (ICESCR). We have chosen those that have been the subject of previous academic study, thus reducing the amount of development time required on each of these rights. In the area of economic, social, and cultural rights we have also drawn on the General Comments of the treaty monitoring body of the ICESCR (which more finely delineate the substantive rights and elaborate the normative content of each right). We have followed the Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights (OHCHR)’s classification of the substantive social and economic rights by treating the right to water as a key component of the right to housing. Data limitations have also had an influence – e.g. we do not have a separate metric for the right to social security, although our right to work metric captures some elements of the right to social security.

Our selection of an initial set of rights does not imply that these are seen as more important or more fundamental than those rights that are not included. HRMI believes that all human rights are universal, inalienable, and interdependent. As we evolve, we aim to produce measures that reflect the equal importance of human rights for a life of dignity.

We are very interested in measuring violations of the rights of people in specific regions and vulnerable population subgroups. All people have the same rights as every other person. For civil and political rights, the information that we collect will help us identify which sub-populations are particularly vulnerable to rights violations in each country. In the future we would like to consider the development of measures for specific groups.

For economic and social rights, our methodology can be used to identify rights fulfilment for different sub-populations if the underlying data are available for these groups. This has already been done for some countries. For example, Randolph, Prairie and Stewart (2012) show substantial differences in the degree to which rights are fulfilled across states in the United States and pronounced differences across ethnic groups. In fact, the highest score in any state on rights fulfilment for both Black and Hispanic people is lower than the lowest score on rights fulfilment for White people in any state.

A study by Shareen and Randolph (2015) shows that in India, the prevalence of hunger and malnutrition varies by state, but not due to inadequate food production. States in India with the highest per capita food production meet their obligations to fulfil the right to food to a lesser degree than states with the lowest per capita food production. (Hertel, Shareen, and Susan Randolph. 2015. “The Challenge of Ensuring Food Security: Global Perspectives and Evidence from India.” Chapter 8 in Closing the Rights Gap: From Human Rights to Social Transformation, edited by La Dawn Haglund and Robin Strykler. Oakland: University of California Press.)

People often assume that good metrics of human rights performance must already exist. Unfortunately, existing data are piecemeal and of varying quality, particularly in the area of civil and political rights. This is partly because of the political sensitivity of human rights, which means that such measures need to be produced independently of governments.

All Rights Tracker metrics are openly licensed under Creative Commons Attribution-Non Commercial 4.0 International. We expect Rights Tracker data to be put to a wide range of uses including:

to support research and advocacy
to facilitate better policy design
to monitor/evaluate impact
to encourage more ethical capital flows

Ultimately, we hope that our data will contribute to transformative change in the way billions of people are able to live their lives.

HRMI metrics are complementary to the UN’s Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) in a number of ways.

In the area of economic and social rights, our metrics are particularly relevant to SDGs 1, 2, 3, 4, and 10. Several of the official SDG indicators are also indicators used in the construction of our economic and social rights metrics. The main value added of HRMI’s metrics is that for those SDG (such as eliminating child stunting) that overlap with an indicator used in the construction of one of our metrics, our economic and social rights metrics can shed light on:

How close to the SDG a given country using best practices could feasibly get using its own resources
The extent to which a country is doing as much as is reasonably feasible to achieve the SDG concerned
The magnitude of financial resources that richer countries will need to make available to a given low-income country to realise the SDG concerned

This is important because the SDGs contemplate all countries realising the same target value on each indicator. For many countries in the global South, these targets will be impossible to achieve alone, even if they allocate the maximum of their available resources and use best practices. Thus, under the SDGs, richer countries are called on to help meet the challenge by facilitating the expansion of low-income countries’ resource capacity through transfers of financial, technical, and institutional resources. HRMI’s economic and social rights methodology helps to shed light on what the relative contributions should be from each country itself vs the international community.

In the area of civil and political rights, our metrics can help with the monitoring of SDG 16, which is focused on the promotion of “just, peaceful, and inclusive societies.” For example, some specific targets associated with Goal 16 that our metrics could be used to help monitor include:

Goal 16 target	Relevant HRMI metric/s
Significantly reduce all forms of violence and related death rates everywhere	Right to freedom from torture Right to freedom from the death penalty Right to freedom from extrajudicial execution Right to freedom from disappearance
Promote the rule of law at the national and international levels and ensure equal access to justice for all	As above + Right to freedom from arbitrary arrest
Ensure responsive, inclusive, participatory and representative decision-making at all levels	Right to participate in government Right to opinion and expression Right to assembly and association Right to freedom of religion and belief
Ensure public access to information and protect fundamental freedoms, in accordance with national legislation and international agreements	All 8 metrics listed above

We release HRMI data annually between May and June. Sign up to our occasional newsletter to be informed when new data are released.

Check out one of our guided tours of the Rights Tracker data on our YouTube channel for an explanation of the scores.

Our in-depth methodology guide should help you to understand how our metrics are produced. However, we do not have the resources to provide detailed commentary on each country’s scores. For a more general discussion of the human rights challenges in each country we recommend visiting the websites of local or international human rights NGOs (e.g. Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch).

The construction of our economic and social rights metrics was vetted over a multi-year period by experts from a wide range of non-Western as well as Western cultures. Our civil and political rights methodology and survey design has been developed using a co-design approach, which has included input from participants from non-Western cultures. The information itself is gathered from in-country respondents wherever possible.

Questions about our civil and political human rights

Survey respondents must fit in one of the following categories:

Human rights expert (researcher, lawyer, other practitioner) monitoring civil and political rights events in a country.
Journalist covering human rights issues in a country.
Staff working for the National Human Rights Institution (NHRI) of a survey country, ONLY if it is fully compliant with the Paris Principles including being completely independent in fulfilling its mandate.

Since we do not have the capacity to vet all potential survey respondents ourselves, we work through trusted partners. They help to connect us to potential survey respondents who meet the above criteria. We then ask those potential survey respondents to nominate others in that country who meet our criteria (a snowball approach). The identities of survey respondents are closely guarded, so as not to place any of these individuals at risk for sharing their perception of events with us.

We view our survey responses as representing the knowledge of the person filling out the survey, and not the position of the organisation or employer for whom they may work. As such, there can be multiple respondents from within a single organisation.

Trusted partners are employees of vetted international human rights NGOs, networks of smaller domestic human rights NGOs, networks of other expert practitioners (such as journalists), or A-status national human rights institutions. Nevertheless, this study is completely independent of these organisations, and these organisations bear no responsibility for any of the work that HRMI does. Some of our trusted partners include: Amnesty International, East Asia Forum, Committee to Protect Journalists (CPJ), Human Rights Watch (HRW), the Fund for Global Human Rights, ATLAS women, and Global Investigative Journalism Network (GIJN).

Even though the state is the primary guarantor of human rights, it is also the principal violator (Donnelly 2003: 35). Given the special status of the state in international law as the primary entity in whom the responsibility to ensure human rights enjoyment is vested, governments have many reasons to minimise, frame, and deny responsibility for a host of human rights problems. As such, we prefer to collect information from actors who do not have major conflicts of interest.

We plan on expanding our country coverage annually. To see all the countries we currently cover, please visit our country coverage page.

Human rights practitioners are often at risk of persecution from their governments. In recognition of this, we have put in place a clear process to collect and store this information securely.

A key step in processing the data is analysing respondents’ answers to questions about a set of hypothetical countries: the ‘anchoring vignettes’. The answers people give to the questions about these anchoring vignettes tell us how to interpret their answers about their own country. This allows us to properly compare peoples’ responses, even if those people understand the question differently from one another, or interpret the scale (from, eg, ‘slightly’ to ‘extremely’) differently.

There’s also another reason these vignettes are important. The anchoring vignettes describe three fictional country situations which always represent three categories: one country that’s doing quite well in respecting human rights, one country that’s doing very badly, and one that’s in the middle. We expect every respondent to give slightly different responses in where they would put each country on the scale, but everyone should place them in the same order, with the good country scoring best, and the terrible country scoring worst. If a respondent puts them in a different order, we have to assume they either aren’t paying attention, or they don’t have a clear understanding of human rights. If they order the vignettes wrongly, we have to disqualify their answer for their own country for this section. The bottom line is that answering the vignette questions properly is vital if you want your other answers to contribute to the Rights Tracker data.

The vignettes can feel a bit weird to read when people start the survey, but they are an absolutely crucial part of the methodology, helping to ensure the validity and credibility of our data.

Questions about our economic and social rights methodology

The key innovation of our economic and social rights methodology is that it incorporates an evidence-based approach to identifying what it is feasible for a country to achieve at each per-capita income level. Econometric techniques are used to estimate an achievement possibilities frontier for each indicator that reflects what is feasible, as determined by what the best performing countries have in fact achieved, at each per-capita income level. These achievement possibility frontiers are the performance benchmarks for each per-capita income level against which countries’ actual performance is evaluated. This approach is further elaborated in the resources mentioned on the methodology page.

The scores on the economic and social rights metrics tell you the percentage of the feasible level of enjoyment achieved on the right concerned (given the country’s income level) not the extent to which people in the country enjoy the right. Thus, a poor country could achieve a high score even though the right is not fulfilled for a large proportion of the population. Conversely, a country that has many times the resources necessary to fulfil the right, but fails to fully do so, will receive a lower score.

The fact that the same data is not always collected for all countries in the world means that we have two different economic and social rights measures: the core assessment standard and the high-income OECD assessment standard. For each type of measure, rights metrics are directly comparable across countries and over time. All countries are evaluated under both assessment standards to the extent data are available.

For countries with per-capita income levels multiple times what’s needed to reach the maximum achievement score but who still fail to do so, we impose a penalty on their score. More specifically, if a country’s per-capita income, Y, is greater than the per-capita income level where the achievement possibility frontier peaks, Yp, and the country’s achievement on the indicator is less than 100% of peak frontier level, then the country’s rescaled indicator score of x%, is adjusted: a penalty is subtracted from the achieved rescaled indicator score to get the indicator performance score. The penalty increases by factor related to Yp as per-capita income increases and the size of the penalty depends on the country’s rescaled indicator score.

The statistical indicators feeding into each of the sets of rights metrics are listed in our methodology handbook.