The Scope of Human Rights:

From Background Concepts to Indicators

©Dr. Todd Landman

Co-Director, Human Rights Centre
Senior Lecturer, Department of Government
University of Essex
Wivenhoe Park
Colchester, Essex CO4 3SQ
United Kingdom
www.essex.ac.uk
Phone/Fax: +44 (0) 1206-872129
Email: todd@essex.ac.uk

Paper prepared for the AHRI-COST Action meeting 11-13 March 2005, Oslo.
Paper is in Draft form, please do not cite without permission of the author.
 TABLE OF CONTENTS

Introduction 1

1.The Scope of Human Rights 2

1.1. Categories of human rights 2

1.2. Dimensions of human rights 5

2. From Concepts to Indicators 10

3. Extant Measures 13

3.1. Rights in principle 13

3.2. Rights in practice 15

3.3. Government policies and outcomes 24

4. Lacunae and conclusions 27

Note on the author 31

References 32
 The Scope of Human Rights

Introduction

This paper sets out to establish the logical and operational connection between human

rights concepts and human rights indicators, the combination of which is essential for

human rights measurement. The international human rights, policy, and donor

community has long sought to establish the full content of human rights that ought to

be promoted and protected, while less progress has been made on providing

meaningful, valid, and reliable measures of human rights. Advocacy for new

standards and greater state participation in the international human rights ‘regime’

(Donnelly 2003; Landman 2005b) as well as the monitoring and alerting of human

rights violations has often times occurred in isolation from measurement efforts and

secondary academic analysis, both of which seek to provide standardised methods for

representing the variation in human rights protection. More recently, some key actors

within the human rights NGO sector1 have not only taken on board the measurement

agenda set by political scientists, sociologists, economists, and statisticians, but have

surpassed these academic communities in some degree with respect to the

measurement of certain human rights (see Landman 2005a).

In order to illustrate the necessary and inexorable link between human rights concepts

and human rights indicators, this paper is divided into four sections. The first section

describes the scope or ‘domain’ of human rights (Sorell and Landman 2005) that

includes both their different categories and dimensions. The second section explains

how social scientific measurement moves through four different levels ranging from

general background concepts to specific scores on specific human rights across

1
For example, the Human Rights Data Analysis Group (HRDAG) at the American Association for the
Advancement of Science, many of whom are now based at the Benetech Initiative in Palo Alto
(www.martus.org), and Physicians for Human Rights.
 The Scope of Human Rights

specific units of analysis (e.g. a high score on civil rights CR↑ in country X in year T).

The third section discusses extant measures of human rights, including those that

measure rights ‘in principle’ (i.e. de jure state commitment), ‘in practice’ (i.e. de facto

realisation), and as a government ‘policy’ (i.e. inputs, outputs, and outcomes) (see

Landman 2004). The fourth and final section discusses the remaining lacunae that

ought to be addressed in order to move the human rights measurement agenda

forward.

1. The Scope of Human Rights

In their contemporary manifestation, human rights are a set of individual and

collective rights that have been formally promoted and protected through international

and domestic law since the 1948 Universal Declaration of Human Rights. Arguments,

theories, protections, and violations of such rights, however, have been in existence

for much longer (see e.g. Claude 1976; Foweraker and Landman 1997: 1-45; Freeman

2002b: 14-54; Ishay 2004; Sorell and Landman 2005), but since the Universal

Declaration, the evolution of their express legal protection has grown rapidly. Today,

the numerous international treaties on human rights promulgated since the Universal

Declaration to which an increasingly large number of nation states are a party define

the core content of human rights that ought to be protected across categories of civil,

political, economic, social, and solidarity rights.2

1.1. Categories of Human Rights

The collection of human rights protected by international law draws on a longer of

tradition of rights from philosophy, history, and normative political theory and now

2
Attempts to enumerate all the human rights that are protected vary between total of 58 and 64 (see
Davidson 1993; Gibson 1996; Green 2001; Donnelly 2003).

2
 The Scope of Human Rights

includes three sets, or categories of rights that have become useful shortcuts for

talking about human rights among scholars and practitioners in the field, and will be

used throughout the remainder of this paper. These three categories are: (1) civil and

political rights, (2) economic, social, and cultural rights, and (3) solidarity rights. It

has been typically understood that individuals and certain groups are bearers of

human rights, while the state is the prime organ that can protect and/or violate human

rights. The political sociology of human rights argues that historical struggles by

oppressed groups have yielded a greater degree of protection for larger sets of

individuals and groups whose rights have not always been guaranteed while the state

itself, in attempt to construct a national identity and fortify its capacity to govern, has

extended various rights protections to increasingly larger sectors of society

(Foweraker and Landman 1997). The struggle for human rights and contemporary

arguments about their continued promotion and protection have extended beyond

exclusive attention on the legal obligations of nation states and have started focussing

on how non-state actors, such as guerrilla movements, terrorist organisations,

warlords, multi-national corporations, and international financial institutions, may be

conceived as responsible for human rights violations and how such entities may carry

an obligation for their protection (see Forsythe 2000: 191-214; UN Global Compact

Office and OHCHR 2004). These different categories of human rights are considered

in turn.

Civil and political rights uphold the sanctity of the individual before the law and

guarantee his or her ability to participate freely in civil, economic, and political

society. Civil rights include such rights as the right to life, liberty, and personal

security; the right to equality before the law; the right of protection from arbitrary

3
 The Scope of Human Rights

arrest; the right to the due process of law; the right to a fair trial; and the right to

religious freedom and worship. When protected, civil rights guarantee one's

'personhood' and freedom from state-sanctioned interference or violence. Political

rights include such rights as the right to speech and expression; the rights to assembly

and association; and the right to vote and political participation. Political rights thus

guarantee individual rights to involvement in public affairs and the affairs of state. In

many ways, both historically and theoretically, civil and political rights have been

considered fundamental human rights for which all nation states have a duty and

responsibility to uphold (see Davidson 1993: 39-45; Donnelly 1998: 18-35; Forsythe

2000: 28-52). They have also been seen as so-called ‘negative’ rights since they

merely require the absence of their violation in order to be upheld.

Social and economic rights include such rights as the right to a family; the right to

education; the right to health and well being; the right to work and fair remuneration;

the right to form trade unions and free associations; the right to leisure time; and the

right to social security. When protected, these rights help promote individual

flourishing, social and economic development, and self-esteem. Cultural rights, on

the other hand, include such rights as the right to the benefits of culture; the right to

indigenous land, rituals, and shared cultural practices; and the right to speak one's

own language and ‘mother tongue’ education. Cultural rights are meant to maintain

and promote sub-national cultural affiliations and collective identities, and protect

minority communities against the incursions of national assimilationist and nation-

building projects. In contrast to the first set of rights, this second set of social,

economic, and cultural rights is often seen as an aspirational and programmatic set of

rights that national governments ought to strive to achieve through progressive

4
 The Scope of Human Rights

implementation. They have thus been considered less fundamental than the first set of

rights and are seen as ‘positive’ rights whose realisation depends heavily on the fiscal

capacity of states (Davidson 1993; Harris 1998: 9; see also Foweraker and Landman

1997: 14-17).

Solidarity rights, which include rights to public goods such as development and the

environment, seek to guarantee that all individuals and groups have the right to share

in the benefits of the earth's natural resources, as well as those goods and products

that are made through processes of economic growth, expansion, and innovation.

Many of these rights are transnational in that they make claims against wealthy

nations to redistribute wealth to poor nations, cancel or reduce international debt

obligations, pay compensation for past imperial and colonial adventures, reduce

environmental degradation, and help promote policies for sustainable development.

Of the three sets of rights, this final set is the newest and most progressive and reflects

a certain reaction against the worst effects of globalization, as well as the relative

effectiveness of 'green' political ideology and social mobilization around concerns for

the health of the planet.

1.2. Dimensions of Human Rights

The distinction between these sets of rights follows the historical struggle for them

(Marshall 1963; Claude 1976; Barbalet 1988; Davidson 1993), the appearance of the

separate international instruments that protect them, the philosophical arguments

concerning their status, and the methodological issues surrounding their measurement

(see Claude and Jabine 1992; Foweraker and Landman 1997: 46-65; Landman 2004).

But significant sections of the human rights community have challenged these

5
 The Scope of Human Rights

traditional distinctions between ‘generations’ of human rights and have sought to

establish the general claim that all rights are indivisible and mutually reinforcing, a

sentiment that found formal expression in the 1993 Vienna Declaration and

Programme of Action (Boyle 1995; Donnelly 1999). Such a challenge suggests that it

is impossible to talk about certain sets of human rights in isolation, since the

protection of one right may be highly contingent on the protection of other rights. For

example, full protection of the right to vote is largely meaningless in societies that do

not have adequate health, education, and social welfare provision, since high rates of

illiteracy and poverty may mean the de facto disenfranchisement of large sectors of

the population. Equally, those interested in combating torture need to examine

possible underlying socio-economic, cultural, and organizational reasons for the

practice of torture, which themselves may rely on the variable protection of other

human rights (see Huggins, Haritos-Fatouros, and Zimbardo 2002).

This human rights challenge also suggests that there is a false dichotomy between

negative and positive rights (Shue 1980; Donnelly 2003: 30-33) that tends to privilege

civil and political rights over economic and social rights, since the protection of the

former appears less dependent on state resources than the latter (Foweraker and

Landman 1997: 14-17). One response to this false dichotomy is to claim that ‘all

rights are positive’ (Holmes and Sunstein 1999) since the full protection of all

categories of human rights ultimately relies on the relative fiscal capacity of states. In

this view, the protection of property rights requires a well-funded judiciary, police

force, and fire service, as well as a well-developed infrastructure that can relay

information, goods, and services in the event that property is under threat in some

way. A similar argument can be made about guaranteeing the right to vote. Beyond

6
 The Scope of Human Rights

prohibiting intimidation and discrimination at the polls, running a free and fair

election requires a tremendous amount of financial support, technology, and

infrastructure, the need for which has been illustrated dramatically by the highly

contested process and result of the 2000 Presidential Election in the United States.

And as above, the prevention of torture involves training and education within police

and security forces, which entails the need for significant financial resources from the

state.

Another response to the traditional division between positive and negative human

rights is to view them has having positive and negative dimensions, the full

delineation of which is essential for human rights measurement (Landman 2004: 922-

923). By claiming that all rights are positive, we may lose sight of significant negative

characteristics of human rights. While it is clearly possible above to see how civil and

political rights have positive characteristics (i.e. the provision of well-funded

judiciaries, training and education programmes, and well-developed infrastructure), it

is equally possible to see how economic and social rights have significant negative

characteristics. For example, just like torture by the state is seen as preventable if only

the state refrained from torturing, discrimination in public education and healthcare is

equally preventable if only the state refrained from so discriminating. In this way, it is

equally possible to have a ‘violations approach’ (Chapman 1996) to studying the

promotion and protection of economic, social, and cultural rights as it is to studying

the promotion and protection of civil and political rights.

Table 1 shows how such a conceptualisation of human rights looks if we are to

include their positive and negative dimensions. The table is a 2 X 3 matrix resulting

7
 The Scope of Human Rights

from three categories of human rights, each with corresponding positive and negative

dimensions. Positive dimensions include those actions that states can take to provide

resources and policies for improving the protection of human rights while negative

dimensions are those actions that states do (or not do) that deliberately violate (or

protect) human rights. Certain cells in the matrix have been well covered in the theory

and practice of human rights. For example, the negative dimensions of civil and

political rights in Cell II are the traditional focus of human rights international

standards (e.g. the 1966 International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights), systems

(e.g. United Nations, European, Inter-American, and African), and mechanisms for

reporting and redress (e.g. Human Rights Committee, European Court of Human

Rights; Inter-American Commission and Inter-American Court of Human Rights);

monitoring, advocacy, and campaigns from human rights non-governmental

organisations (e.g. Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch); and much of the

academic scholarship in political science (see Landman 2005a). Equally, the positive

dimensions of economic, social, and cultural rights in Cell III have been the

traditional focus of human rights international standards (e.g. the 1966 International

Covenant on Economic, Social, and Cultural Rights), mechanisms for reporting and

redress (e.g. the Committee on Economic, Social, and Cultural Rights), non-

governmental organisations working on social justice and minority rights issues (e.g.

Minority Rights Group International) and academic scholarship primarily in

sociology, developmental economics, and anthropology (Turner 1993; Freeman

2002a, 2002b).

Outside these two areas of human rights that have received wide attention and debate,

there have been varying degrees of attention paid to the positive and negative

8
 The Scope of Human Rights

dimensions of human rights depicted in the remaining cells. For the positive

dimensions of civil and political rights in Cell I, the work on ‘good governance’

(Weiss 2000) has sought to examine the ways in which investment in judiciaries,

prisons, and police forces can improve the foundations of governance and so deliver

better economic prosperity (World Bank 1992; Knack and Keefer 1995; Clague,

Keefer, Knack, and Olson 1996, 1997; USAID 1998a, 1998b; de Soto 2000), while

those interested in the administration of justice see such positive aspects of civil and

political rights as essential to addressing problems of the ‘(un)rule’ of law (e.g.

Méndez, O’Donnell, and Pinheiro 1999). For the negative dimensions of economic,

social, and cultural rights in Cell IV, there has been much focus on general patterns of

gender, ethnic, racial, linguistic, and religious discrimination, but perhaps less

attention on how these practices may constitute violations to economic, social, and

cultural rights (Chapman 1996). Since the debt crisis in the 1980s, there has been an

increase in social mobilization and attention (e.g. Charter 99 issued by the One World

Trust) around the transnational issues of debt relief, developmental assistance and

distribution of global income, and ‘post-colonial’ reparations for past practices made

most vocally at the 2001 World Conference Against Racism (Cell V). Since the

1970s, groups have been mobilizing for transnational solutions to the global

environmental problems and have focussed on the negative dimensions of ‘offending’

states such as the United States (Cell VI), but there has been less of a focus on the

rights issues associated with such solutions. Finally, from a human rights perspective,

the work on globalization and trade has focussed on the ‘violation’ represented by

unfair trade agreements hammered out in the World Trade Organisation (e.g. Compa

and Diamond 1996; Francioni 2001), which is seen to be disproportionately

influenced by the United States and the European Union (Steinberg 2005), as well as

9
 The Scope of Human Rights

unsavoury manufacturing and production techniques used by multinational

corporations.

Table 1.1. Positive and negative dimensions of human rights categories

Dimensions

‘Positive’ ‘Negative’
(i.e. provision of resources and (i.e. practices that deliberately
outcomes of policies) violate)

I II
Investment in judiciaries, Torture, extra-judicial killings,
Civil and prisons, police forces, and disappearance, arbitrary detention,
political elections unfair trials, electoral intimidation,
disenfranchisement
Categories of human rights

III IV
Economic, Progressive realisation Ethnic, racial, gender, or linguistic
social, and Investment in health, education, discrimination in health, education,
cultural and welfare and welfare

V VI
Compensation for past wrongs Environmental degradation
Debt relief CO2 emissions
Solidarity Overseas development and Unfair trade
technical assistance

2. From Concepts to Indicators

The various examples outlined in the previous section show how human rights

measurement can benefit from such a conceptual delineation, since it disaggregates

the concept of human rights into different categories across different dimensions and

facilitates the process of operationalizing human rights for systematic analysis. As we

shall see, the different dimensions and categories provide the content for developing

‘events-based’, ‘standards-based’, ‘survey based’ and other measures of human rights

(see Section 3). But what are the operational steps that allow us to move from these

conceptual distinctions of human rights to the provision of valid, meaningful, and

reliable measures? At an abstract methodological level, the process of measurement

10
 The Scope of Human Rights

converts well-defined and well-specified concepts into meaningful quantitative

measures or qualitative categories, and has four main steps (Adcock and Collier 2001,

also Zeller and Carmines 1980). The first level concerns the background concept that

is to be measured (i.e. human rights), which is the broad constellation of meanings

and understandings associated with the concept. The scope of human rights outlined

above summarises what comprises such a broad constellation of meanings and

understandings in the field of human rights. The second level develops the systemised

concept, which specifies further the concept that is to be measured, such as a specific

right (e.g. the right not to be tortured) or a group of rights (e.g. civil rights). The third

level operationalizes the systematised concept into meaningful, valid, and reliable

indicators, such as events-based, standards-based, survey-based, or other measures

(see next section). The final level provides scores on indicators for the units of

analysis being used (e.g. individuals, groups, countries, regions, etc.). Figure 1 depicts

these four levels graphically.

Level 1
Background Concept
The broad constellation of meanings and understandings associated with a given concept
Normative and empirical theory

Level 2
Systematized Concept
A specific formulation of a concept used by scholar, IGO, NGO
Dimensions and components of concept

Level 3
Indicators
Also referred to as 'measures', 'operationalisations', and classifications
Events-based, standards-based (ordinal, interval, nominal), survey-based (ordinal, interval, nominal)

Level 4
Scores for Units
The scores for units of observation (e.g. individuals, countries, regions) generated by a particular indicator.
Quantitative and qualitative data.

Figure 1. Levels of measurement

Sources: Zeller and Carmines 1980; Adcock and Collier 2001

11
 The Scope of Human Rights

Consider a concrete example. The background concept to be measured is human

rights, the scope of which has been systematically outlined above across its different

categories (civil, political, economic, social, cultural, and solidarity) and dimensions

(positive and negative). The international community of human rights scholars and

practitioners have spent the years in the lead up to and the years since the 1948

Universal Declaration of Human Rights ‘constructing’ (Donnelly 1999) and

‘justifying’ (Sorell and Landman 2005) human rights in conceptual and legal terms.

While there have not been agreed philosophical foundations for the existence of

human rights (Mendus 1995; Landman 2004; 2005a), the extant international law of

human rights provides a general consensus on the core content of those human rights

that ought to be protected (Landman and Häusermann 2003). Such a core content

comprises Steps 1 and 2 in the levels of measurement.

The matrix representing the intersection between the categories and dimensions of

human rights is a systematic way of organising the first step to measurement.

Consider the right not to be tortured, which is a systematised concept of human rights

that has been identified most notably in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights

(UDHR), the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights (ICCPR), and the

Convention Against Torture (CAT). The systematised concept is susceptible to

operationalization at Level 3. But given the two dimensions of human rights, the right

not to be tortured can be measured at Level 3 both positively (i.e. resources a state is

investing in procedures, policies, reforms, and training for the prevention of torture)

and negatively (formal commitment to international standards on torture and actual

incidence of torture). At Level 4, the right not to be tortured is measured for a unit

(e.g. Brazil) at a particular time (e.g. 1985), across its positive dimension (e.g. % GDP

12
 The Scope of Human Rights

spent on torture reform, number of police in receipt of torture training, cases of

reprimand for torture) and its negative dimension (e.g. incidence of torture revealed

through events counting, a scale of torture, or survey estimations on popular

experiences of torture). In this way, the right not to be tortured may have several

indicators that measure its core content across its two dimensions.

3. Extant Measures

The burgeoning literature on human rights measurement (Claude and Jabine 1992;

Green 2001; Landman 2004) comprises Levels 3 and 4 in the measurement schema

outlined above. Extant approaches have measured human rights 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. 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 reporting of rights

violations, survey data on perceptions of rights conditions, quantitative summaries of

rights violations, abstract scales of rights protection based on normative standards,

and individual and aggregate measures that map the outcomes of government policies

that have consequences for the enjoyment of rights.

3.1. 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 (1978) set an important

precedent by coding constitutions for 157 countries across a multitude of institutional

13
 The Scope of Human Rights

and rights dimensions for the period 1788-1975. Chapter 6 of 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. Their study is broadly descriptive in

nature, but their data allow for global patterns and processes of change in the formal

protection of rights at the domestic level to be mapped, while secondary and more

advanced statistical analysis could be conducted on the patterns within the data while

exploring possible relationships with other indicators. For example, Foweraker and

Landman (1997: 51-52) use an 'institutional procedural index' to 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 transition. In similar fashion, Poe and Keith (2004) code national

constitutions to measure their ability to suspend rights protection during states of

emergency. At the global level, Keith (1999), Landman (2001, 2005b), and Hathaway

(2002) code the regional and international human rights regimes by scoring countries

for signing and ratifying major human rights instruments. Rather than code individual

rights provisions, these authors code the degree to which countries are parties to

human rights treaties over time.

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

since it translates qualitative legal 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 (1997: 62-65)

use regression techniques to gauge the relative 'gap' between rights in principle and

rights in practice in Brazil, Chile, Mexico, and Spain (see also Duvall and Shamir

1980: 162-163; Arat 1991). Their analysis demonstrates that during the process of

14
 The Scope of Human Rights

political liberalization, authoritarian states can deny rights that they proclaim are

protected (a negative gap), protect rights they proclaim are protected (a zero gap), or

protect rights that they proclaim are not protected (a positive gap). Poe and Keith

(2004) use their state of emergency variable to examine the relationship between the

law and practice of human rights while controlling for the independent effects of

democracy, wealth, and warfare. 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 co-efficients between ratification

and rights variables (Keith 1999; Landman 2001; Hathaway 2002; see also Krasner

1999: 122). Carrying out such analyses, however, requires measurement of rights in

practice to which the discussion now turns.

3.2. 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 government. 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. 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 information on the degree to which human rights

are being violated. Indeed, greater concerns over humans rights since World War II

15
 The Scope of Human Rights

has led to an explosion in the number of domestic and international human rights

NGOs collecting information on violations. 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 (Forsythe 2000: 163-190; Welch 2001: 1-6; Landman

and Abraham 2003).

The increase in the salience of human rights as an issue combined with organizations

dedicated to documenting human rights violations means that there is greater

availability of comprehensive information on actual practices of states and the

conditions under which individuals live. But this information necessarily will be

lumpy and incomplete, since reporting of human rights violations is fraught with

difficulties, including fear within victims, power of the offenders, comprehensive

evidence, quality of communications technology, among others. In recognising this

problem, Bollen (1992: 198) argues that there are six levels of information on human

rights violations: (1) an ideal level with all characteristics of all violations (either

reported or unreported), followed by (2) recorded violations, (3) known and

accessible violations, (4) locally reported violations (nation-state), (5) internationally

reported violations, and (6) the most biased coverage of violations, which may include

only those reported in US. Indeed, the early behaviourist attempts to measure political

violence used the New York Times Index only for its source of information (e.g.

Taylor and Hudson 1972; Taylor and Jodice 1983), while new approaches on dissent

and repression use multiple newswire sources that are machine coded (e.g. Francisco

2004).3

3
The time-series daily and sub-daily protest and repression data for a selection of countries can be
found at: http://lark.cc.ku.edu/~ronfran/data/index.html

16
 The Scope of Human Rights

Other work in this area seeks to obtain lower levels of information in much greater

detail. For example, the Torture Reporting Handbook (Giffard 2000) and Reporting

Killings as Human Rights Violations (Thompson and Giffard 2002) 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.4 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 (Dueck 1992: 127).5 While such increased

information at all levels is helpful for systematic human rights research, there remains

a trade-off 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.6

These issues about levels of information and the commensurability for cross-national

analysis delineate the three types of data available for measuring human rights in

practice: (1) events-based, (2) standards-based, and (3) survey-based. Events-based

data chart the reported acts of violation committed 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

4
Both these manuals are published by the Human Rights Centre at the University of Essex. For an on-
line copy of the Torture Reporting Handbook, go to www.essex.ac.uk/torturehandbook.
5
For up to date information on the activities of and groups involved with HURIDOCS, see
www.huridocs.org.
6
For a treatment of this trade-off between levels of abstraction and the scope of countries under
comparison, see Landman (2000, 2002, 2003).

17
 The Scope of Human Rights

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 (Ball, Spirer, and Spirer 2000).

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 on the perception of rights protection. Such measures track

individual level perceptions or rights violations.7

These different types of data map overall human rights practices within a country in

different ways. The HURIDOCS project, handbooks such as those on torture (Giffard

2000) and unlawful killings (Thompson and Giffard 2002), 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' (e.g. Poe and Tate 1994), the 'index of political

freedom' (Freedom House), the torture scale (Hathaway 2002), 'the minorities at risk'

project (Gurr 1993), and the 'state failure project' (Esty et al. 1998) use available

information on human rights practices of states to generate global indices. Finally,

general survey-based data on rights can be found in such studies as the

7
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 since individuals may not respond to such questions owing to fear, intimidation and the
possibility of recrmination. 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.

18
 The Scope of Human Rights

Eurobarometer (and now World Barometer) series and the World Values Survey

(Inglehart 1977, 1990, 1997, 1998). 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.8 Finally, NGOs such as Physicians for Human

Rights have begun using household surveys of ‘at risk’ populations (e.g. internally

displaced people in Afghanistan and women in Sierra Leone) to capture the degree to

which particular groups suffer disproportionate human rights violations (Physicians

for Human Rights 2002a, 2002b, 2002c, 2003).

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 on political killings

collected and analysed by the Commission for Truth and Reconciliation in Peru (Ball,

Asher, Sulmont, and Manrique 2003). 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 1 (full protection) to 7 (full

violation).9 The personal integrity rights measures are abstract scales that range from

8
The results of the Home Office survey will be available on www.homeoffice.gov.uk.
9
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 preference 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;
informal consensus, de facto opposition power. The checklist for civil liberties includes: media and
literature are free of political censorship; open public discussion; freedom of assembly and
demonstration; freedom of political or quasi-political organization; non-discriminatory rule of law in
politically relevant cases; free from unjustified political terror or imprisonment; free trade unions,
peasant organizations, or equivalent; free businesses or co-operatives; free professional or other private
organizations; free religious institutions; personal social rights; socio-economic rights. See. Gastil

19
 The Scope of Human Rights

1 (full protection) to 5 (full violation) for state practice that include torture, political

imprisonment, unlawful killing, and disappearance. Information for these scales

comes from the US State Department and Amnesty International country reports (Poe

and Tate 1994). In similar fashion, Hathaway (2002) measures torture on a 1 to 5

scale using information from the US State Department. Finally, Figure 8 summarises

the results of household surveys on sexual violence in Sierra Leone during the worst

years of the armed conflict.

Figure 6. Events data from the Peruvian Truth and Reconciliation Commission
Source: Ball, Asher, Sulmont, and Manrique 2003.

(1987, 1990); Freedom House (1990); and

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

20
 The Scope of Human Rights

3.5

2.5
FH Political Rights
Rights Scale

FH Civil Rights
Torture Scale (Hathaway)
Amnesty PIR
State Department PIR
2

1.5

1
1976

1977

1978

1979

1980

1981

1982

1983

1984

1985

1986

1987

1988

1989

1990

1991

1992

1993

1994

1995

1996

1997

1998

1999

2000
Year

Figure 7. Standards-based measures for the world 1976-2000

Source: Landman (2005c).

Figure 8. Household survey data on sexual abuse in Sierra Leone

Source: Physicians for Human Rights 2002b

While these three examples of human rights measures focus on civil and political

rights, Section 1 in this paper argued that it is possible to extend the methodological

21
 The Scope of Human Rights

discussion to include the measurement of economic, social, and cultural rights.

Indeed, 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 violations. Overt, institutionalised, 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, and/or survey-based data. The

minorities at risk project codes the degree to which 224 different minority and

communal groups experience discrimination using such ordinal scales (see Gurr 1993,

and also Foweraker and Krznaric 2001).

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 misrepresentative data. It is impossible to document every last human rights

violation and those organisations collecting such information tend to concentrate on

conflict-stricken societies during discrete periods of time and thus cross-country

comparisons using such measures is problematic. In contrast, standards-base 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

22
 The Scope of Human Rights

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 standardised 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.10 It is important therefore

that those measuring human rights in practice recognise the limits of their data.

3.3. 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, Parr (2002) makes the useful distinction between human rights conduct

and developmental outcomes that may have a bearing on human rights. She stresses

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

quantifiable measurement (see Radstaake and Bronkhurst 2002: 31-32). In the

language of this present paper, 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 Parr

(2002) assumes. The discussion in the preceding section demonstrated that human

10
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 MacIntyre 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 Renteln 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 (see
Almond and Verba 1963, 1989; Inglehart 1977, 1990, 1997, 1998). In many cases, they identify
'functional equivalents' across different governmental institutions in order to allow for cross-cultural
comparison (see Dogan and Pelassy 1990; Landman 2000, 2003).

23
 The Scope of Human Rights

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 summarised quantitatively

(events data), translated into comparable quantitative ordinal scales (standards-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, expenditure

on health, education, and welfare, among many others.11 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) (UNDP 1999: 127-

137). 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. It is also possible to combine the HDI with standards-based

measures of human rights to get a better picture of the interaction between human

development and human rights. Figure 9 is a scatter plot between the HDI and a

‘factor score’ created through principal component extraction from the two versions

of the Political Terror Scale, the two Freedom House scales, and the torture measure.

The assumption behind using factor analysis is that each of the five measures is

measuring common human rights phenomena. The curvilinear cubic functional form

in the figure provides the best overall fit for the relationship between human

development and human rights (i.e. has the highest R2), but using the UNDP’s cut-off

11
The World Bank has over 500 separate indicators for the whole world for the period 1960 to the
present, go to www.worldbank.org for information to its on-line world development indicators (WDI)
database.

24
 The Scope of Human Rights

points for low, medium, and high human development also shows the areas of the

world most in need of attention (i.e. those countries with low human development and

high violations of human rights (see Sorell and Landman 2005).

Human Development and Human Rights

(1999, N = 170)
3
Iraq
Angola
Sudan Algeria
Burundi Myanmar
Human Rights Factor (Principal Component)

2 Rwanda
Congo BrazzavilleSyria
China
Sierra Leone Egypt
Eritrea Haiti Kenya Tajikistan Bahrain
1 Zimbabwe
Niger Albania Brunei
Malaysia
Burkina Faso Israel
0 Ghana
Malawi Bolivia

Mali Japan
Benin BotswanaGuyana
-1 Uruguay
Belize
Sweden
-2

-3 Rsq = 0.4196
0.0 .1 .2 .3 .4 .5 .6 .7 .8 .9 1.0

Human Development Index

Figure 9. Scatter plot for Civil and Political Rights and the Human Development Index, 1999

Sources: Landman (2005c), UNDP (1999: 134-137).

In addition, development indicators have been increasingly employed as proxy

measures for the progressive realisation 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 realisation of these rights; steps in which states set goals, targets and

timeframes for national plans to implement these rights. Development indicators are

thus seen as suitable proxy measures to capture the degree to which states are

25
 The Scope of Human Rights

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 (OHCHR 2002).

To date, development indicators have primarily been applied to economic and social

rights, but as Section 1 of this paper has shown, aggregate statistics can equally be

used to measure the positive dimensions of civil and political rights. Following the

work of the United States Agency for International Development (USAID 1998a,

1998b), new efforts propose the use of development indicators as potential proxy

measures for civil and political rights (e.g. investment in prison and police reform, the

processing of cases, and the funding of judiciaries). 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 bi-lingual education can

approximate the degree to which countries adopting policies to upholding 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 (Donnelly 1999).

4. Lacunae and Conclusions

This paper demonstrated the necessary and inexorable links between human rights

concepts and human rights indicators. It showed that the background concept of

human rights has been systematised by the international legal and human rights

community such that there is now a known core content of human rights susceptible

to social scientific operationalisation using a variety of indicators across their

26
 The Scope of Human Rights

different categories and dimensions. These include the positive and negative

dimensions of civil, political, economic, social, cultural, and solidarity rights. Efforts

to operationalise these different dimensions and categories of human rights have

included measures of rights in principle, rights in practice, and proxy measures of

government policies and outcomes. To date, the most efforts have concentrated on

measuring rights in practice and include events-based, standards-based, and survey-

based forms of measurement.

It seems clear, however, that we still know more about what to measure conceptually

and legally than how to measure it. Tremendous progress in human rights

measurement has been achieved but there are serious and significant lacunae in the

field that need to be addressed that include both the content of rights that remain

unmeasured and an over-reliance on certain forms of measurement. First, efforts in

measurement have predominantly concentrated on the negative dimensions of civil,

political rights and some cultural rights (i.e. minority rights discrimination) and the

positive dimensions of economic and social rights. There is thus a dearth of measures

for the positive dimensions of civil and political rights and the negative dimensions of

economic and social rights. In the terms laid in this paper, we need measures for the

provision of resources that support the protection of civil and political rights and we

need measures for the violation of economic and social rights. Second, there is less

agreement on the content of solidarity rights and at best there have been some proxy

measures offered for them, such as the distribution of global income and trade

dependency.

27
 The Scope of Human Rights

Third, there has been an over-reliance on standards-based ordinal measures of human

rights with an emphasis on aggregation into single indices. Such measures maintain a

reasonably high level of abstraction suitable for large cross-national comparisons, but

have problems of validity, reliability, and variance truncation. Such measures need to

be improved by a greater attention to primary sources in an effort to increase their

validity, and greater disaggregation into separate measures of particular human rights.

If standards-based ordinal scales are to be used and greater use is made of primary

source material then such measures should provide more gradation in their ordinal

categories in order to reduce the worst forms of variance truncation. It seems

paramount, however, that such an effort needs to be complemented by other forms of

data, including events-based, survey-based, and indicators of government policies and

outcomes.

A fascinating example of such a combined measurement strategy has been achieved

by the Commission for Reception, Truth, and Reconciliation in East Timor (CAVR),

which has been documenting human rights abuses carried out during the Indonesian

occupation between 25 April 1974 and 25 October 1999. The CAVR has collected

three forms of data: (1) individual testimonies that are coded using the ‘who did what

to whom’ data model outlined above, (2) a graveyard census of all names of all

individuals who died during the period of occupation, and (3) a household mortality

survey. The CAVR has then matched the information by name while maintaining the

violation as the basic unit of analysis and are making projections about the total

number of people killed during the occupation using ‘multiple systems estimation’

techniques used in Guatemala and Peru (Ball, Spirer, and Spirer 2000; Ball, Asher,

Sulmont, and Manrique 2003; Landman 2005d). While such efforts concentrate on

28
 The Scope of Human Rights

single countries that have undergone period in which egregious human rights abuses

have been committed (a form of selection bias), the lessons from their experiences in

combining different forms of human rights data from different primary sources inform

our larger quest for improving and making more scientific the process of human rights

measurement.

29
 The Scope of Human Rights

Note on the author

Dr. Todd Landman (BA University of Pennsylvania, MA Georgetown, MA Colorado,

PhD Essex) is the Co-Director of the Human Rights Centre and Senior Lecturer in the
Department of Government at the University of Essex. He is also Managing Director
of Rights Awareness Ltd., a consulting organization that applies the theories and
methods of social science to human rights problems. He is author of Protecting
Human Rights: A Global Comparative Analysis (Georgetown University Press, 2005),
Issues and Methods in Comparative Politics (Routledge 2000, 2003), Governing Latin
America (Polity Press 2003 with Joe Foweraker and Nail Harvey), and Citizenship
Rights and Social Movements: A Comparative and Statistical Analysis (Oxford
University Press, 1997, 2000 with Joe Foweraker). He has numerous articles in the
British Journal of Political Science, Human Rights Quarterly, International Studies
Quarterly, Democratization, Political Studies, and Electoral Studies. He has carried
out a number of human rights consultancies for the European Commission, the
Ministry of Foreign Affairs of the Netherlands, and the Home Office of the United
Kingdom, as well as Minority Rights Group, the International Centre for Transitional
Justice, and One World Trust. He is currently carrying out research on human rights
defenders and writing a new book entitled Studying Human Rights (Routledge,
forthcoming 2005).

30
 The Scope of Human Rights

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