We aim to measure all human rights

HRMI’s aim is to measure country performance at fulfilling every set of human rights contained in international treaties.

We have started with the rights contained in the international Bill of Rights – the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights and the International Covenant on Economic, Social, and Cultural Rights.

We have now produced detailed, robust metrics for 5 economic and social rights and 8 groups of civil and political rights, which are available on our Rights Tracker.

We have now also begun work on measuring:

Rights of children; CRC (see our proposal)
Freedom of religion and belief

What other human rights are there?

There are plenty more treaties to track.

In the future, we want to begin new workstreams to measure how well countries perform on many other rights or issues, including:

Women’s rights; CEDAW (see our proposal)
Sexual orientation, gender identity and expression, and sex characteristics (SOGIESC) rights.
Racial discrimination; ICERD
Rights of refugees, asylum seekers, displaced persons
Trials, justice, due process

Labour rights
Impunity
Climate crisis and human rights
Statelessness
Rights of persons with disabilities; CRPD
Rights of indigenous peoples; UNDRIP

Do you want to be involved?

If you have expertise, as a human rights practitioner or academic, in any of these areas, we would love to partner with you in the future. There are many different ways you could be involved.

The two things we need for any of these new projects to begin are:

An academic lead
Funding

Either one might come first.

Once those two crucial elements are in place, we would almost certainly hold an international co-design workshop to get input from practitioners and academics from all over the world, as to what’s needed, and what can work.

If you are keen for HRMI to expand to provide data on your area of human rights, you can help in any of these ways:

Become the academic lead for a new workstream. For most areas, this is likely to be a scholar at a university or other research institution, and this project would be their main scholarly/research focus for the next few years (at least). They could be freelance if the project attracted enough funding to include their salary/fee.
Suggest someone else to be the academic lead.
Help develop the new metrics once the work has started, perhaps by attending the co-design workshop.
Suggest a source of funding for a new area of research.
Collaborate with HRMI on a co-application for funding the expansion (we have some ideas for where we might apply, but we know that collaborative applications often have a higher chance of success).
Use our existing data in your own work (we’d love to help you do that).
Tell your colleagues about our work.
Tell colleagues and funders that there is a need for better data in your area of interest, and that HRMI can help fill the gap.
Follow us on Twitter, YouTube, LinkedIn, and Facebook, and share our posts so more people discover how our data can be useful for their work.

What else do you need to know?

HRMI is an independent, non-profit, global collaboration of academics and practitioners.

We have strong guiding values of collaboration, usefulness, rigour, transparency, innovation, and independence.

We work in a non-hierarchical way. A new lead would be responsible for their workstream, and free to move it forward, with support from the wider HRMI team.

Funding for staff on a new workstream would have to be raised along the way as part of the project: there is no existing budget for new work.

New team members can be based anywhere in the world. HRMI is headquartered in Wellington, New Zealand, with another base of operations at the University of Georgia, in the United States. We work with people in many other countries, so we are used to being a globally distributed team.

We welcome new team members from any part of the world. We warmly welcome people from the Global South, and from under-represented groups to join us on the team.

The working language among the team is English.

HRMI is doing exciting, cutting-edge work to improve people’s lives. We would love to have more people join us.

What’s the next step?

Take a look at what we’ve already done, then get in touch!