Frequently asked questions

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 blacks and Hispanics is lower than the lowest score on rights fulfilment for whites 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 HRMI metrics are and always will be available free of charge, and openly licensed under Creative Commons. We expect HRMI 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; etc. 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, and
• The magnitude of financial resources that richer countries will need to make available to a given poor 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 poor 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
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. Our most recent economic and social rights data for 195 countries, and civil and political rights data for 39 countries were released in June 2021. For a more detailed look at HRMI’s annual data cycle, visit our project timeline page.

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.

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. In 2021, we are conducting the expert survey in at least 36 countries and territories. To see all the countries we currently cover, please visit our country coverage page. In 2022, we are expanding the expert survey to include China and India.

Participation is voluntary and unpaid, and we hope that participation (both during and beyond the pilot study) will be incentivised by the value of the data that the survey produces. To be sustainable, every tool should nourish the things upon which it depends. We hope to learn more about how our data can nourish and support the work of survey respondents as this project develops.

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.

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 Measuring Economic & Social Rights 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 shown in the table below:

Statistical indicator	Low- and middle- income assessment standard	High- income assessment standard	Primary data source(s)
Available resources
GDP per person (2017 PPP$)	√	√	World Bank, World Development Indicators
Right to education
Net primary school enrolment rate	√		U.N. Educational, Scientific, and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) Institute for Statistics
Net secondary school enrolment rate	√	√	UNESCO Institute for Statistics
% students scoring level 3 or better on PISA math test		√	Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA)
% students scoring level 3 or better on PISA science test		√	Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA)
% students scoring level 3 or better on PISA reading test		√	Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA)
Right to health
Modern Contraceptive Use Prevalence Rate (% women 15-49)	√		United Nations Population Division (UNPD)
Child (under 5) % survival rate (100 – % child mortality rate)	√	√	Inter-agency Group for child mortality estimates (UNICEF, WHO, United Nations, World Bank)
Adult (15-60) % survival rate. (100 – % adult mortality rate)	√	√	Data from either (1) UNPD or (2) Max Planck Institution for Demographic Research, University of California-Berkeley
% Babies NOT low birth weight (% live births weighing > 2500 grams)		√	Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD), World Bank
Right to food
% Children (under 5) NOT Stunted (100 – child malnutrition prevalence-height for age)	√		UNICEF, WHO, World Bank Joint Child Malnutrition Estimates (JME)
% population NOT moderately or severely food insecure based on the Food Insecurity Experience global reference scale.		√	Food and agricultural organization (FAO)
Right to work
% population NOT absolutely poor (income>$3.20 2011 PPP$ per day)	√		World Bank, World Development Indicators
% population NOT relatively poor (income>50% median income)		√	Luxembourg Income Study, Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD)
% unemployed NOT long-term (>12 months) unemployed		√	Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD)
Right to housing
% population with “basic” drinking water service on premises	√		WHO and UNICEF Joint Monitoring Programme
% population with at least “basic” sanitation facilities	√		WHO and UNICEF Joint Monitoring Programme
% population with “safely managed” sanitation		√	WHO and UNICEF Joint Monitoring Programme
% of poorest income quintile with access to affordable housing		√	Data calculated from OECD Affordable housing database

Factors that influenced the selection of the indicators listed above are:

• Where possible, we select “bellwether indicators” (so that we end up with no more than three indicators for each economic and social right).
• Our selection of statistical indicators is practically constrained by current data availability. This, plus different rights challenges in high-income OECD countries versus other countries, led to our creation of the two separate sets of rights metrics (one for high-income OECD countries and the other, our core assessment standard, for all other countries). For example, for OECD countries, ensuring all students complete primary school is not an issue, so although this is an indicator we use for our core right to education metric, it is not an indicator used for our high-income OECD country right to education metric. For our high-income OECD country right to education metric, we’ve included an indicator of the quality of schooling, performance on the PISA test, among our education indicators. The quality of education is no less a concern for all other countries, it’s just that there is no indicator of educational quality with broad coverage available at this time.