Human Rights Measurement

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This blog focuses on human rights, including economic human rights and political human rights, and therefore also devotes a lot of space to issues related to poverty and democracy (democracy being the practical translation of political human rights). One particular characteristic of this blog is the quantitative approach to human rights: we discuss human rights not only from a philosophical, ethical or legal point of view, but also try to give readers specific data in the form of measurements. For example, we often give data on the numbers of people in poverty, on the numbers of democracies in the world, on the progress or retreat of freedom of expression etc. We have an overview of a large set of data sources here. The figures themselves are catalogued here.

We believe human rights are important social goods (for the reasons stated here), and therefore it’s natural to be interested in progress measures: do countries now show more or less respect for human rights than they used to in the past? We regularly post about measures of this respect.

But apart from the measurements and the data we also discuss the issues surrounding measurement: how does this measurement take place, how should it take place, what are the difficulties etc. Below is an overview of the posts relating to the measurement of human rights.

Content

Measuring Human Rights (1): The Quantitative Approach to Human Rights (Article)
Measuring Human Rights (2): The Importance and the Limits of the Quantitative Approach to Human Rights
Measuring Human Rights (3): Measuring Your Impact
Measuring Human Rights (4): An Overview of Data Sources on Human Rights Violations
Measuring Human Rights (5): Some (Insurmountable?) Problems
Measuring Human Rights (6): Don’t Make Governments Do It
Measuring Human Rights (7): Don’t Let Governments Make it Easy on Themselves
Measuring Human Rights (8): Measurement of the Fairness of Trials and of Expert Witnesses
Measuring Human Rights (9): When “Worse” Doesn’t Necessarily Mean “Worse”
Measuring Human Rights (10): Uncertainty in Maternal Mortality Data
Measuring Human Rights (11): The Number and Percentage of People Living in Poverty
Measuring Human Rights (12): Measuring Public Opinion on Torture
Measuring Human Rights (13): When More Means Less and Vice Versa
Measuring Human Rights (14): Numbers of Illegal Immigrants
Measuring Human Rights (15): Measuring Segregation Using the Dissimilarity Index
Measuring Human Rights (16): The Right to Healthcare
Measuring Human Rights (17): Human Rights and Progress
Measuring Human Rights (18): Guerrilla Polling in Dictatorships
Measuring Human Rights (19): Measuring Racism
Measuring Human Rights (20): What is More Important, the Number or Percentage of People Suffering Human Rights Violations?
Measuring Human Rights (21): Perceptions of Domestic Violence
Measuring Human Rights (22): When Can You Call Something a “Famine”?
Measuring Human Rights (23): When “Worse” Doesn’t Necessarily Mean “Worse”, Ctd.
Measuring Human Rights (24): Measuring Racism, Ctd.
Measuring Human Rights (25): Measuring Hunger
Measuring Human Rights (26): Measuring Murder
Measuring Human Rights (27): Measuring Crime
Measuring Human Rights (28): Countries Hit Hardest by Judgments of the European Court of Human Rights
Measuring Human Rights (29): When More Means Less, and Vice Versa, Ctd.
Measuring Human Rights (30): Distortions Caused by the Exclusion of Prisoners
Measuring Human Rights (31): Which Changes in the Spatial Pattern of Human Rights Are Most Likely?
Measuring Human Rights (32): Assessing Advocacy and Policy by Way of Counterfactual Thinking