This is a map in the form of an animation. If the video doesn’t play, please click here.
More maps on migration are here and here; more maps on remittances here. Statistics on development aid and remittances are here and here respectively. More textual information on development aid and remittances is here and here respectively. Other human rights maps are here. And, finally, an overview of the reasons why migration is a human rights issue is here.
hate groups in the US
And this is the number relative to the population size of each state:
There’s also an interactive version of the first map here, where you can find more information on the groups involved. The Southern Poverty Law Center counted 926 active hate groups in the U.S. in 2008. Since 2000, the number has climbed by more than 50 percent. A hate group is a group that has beliefs or practices that attack or malign an entire class of people, typically for their immutable characteristics. White nationalists, neo-Nazis, racist skinheads, border vigilantes and black separatist organizations are examples of hate group. Their activities can include criminal acts, marches, rallies, speeches, meetings, leafleting or publishing, but not necessarily advocacy of or engagement in violence or other criminal activity.
More on hate in general, on hate speech, on hate crime, on the KKK, and on racism in general. More human rights maps.
women's earnings compared to men's, gender wage gap in the US
Everyone, without any discrimination, has the right to equal pay for equal work (art. 23 of the Universal Declaration). So unequal pay is a human rights issue, and is probably an indication of a deeper kind of discrimination. However, unequal pay is an indication of wage discrimination, not proof. If men and women, on average receive unequal pay, it’s only discrimination if they perform equal work, which isn’t necessarily the case.
More data here. More on gender discrimination in general is here.
Some data for the year 2008:
Military Spending Worldwide as Percentage of GDP and of World Total
And this is for the year 2010:
military spending as percentage of GDP
military spending, total
More on military spending (or “defense” spending) here. Some statistics here. More maps here.
First, why is this a human rights issue? Well, there’s article 23 of the Universal Declaration:
Everyone who works has the right to just and favourable remuneration ensuring for himself and his family an existence worthy of human dignity, and supplemented, if necessary, by other means of social protection.
And there’s generally the issue of the absence of poverty as a human right. A minimum wage is obviously intended to protect people from poverty. Economists disagree on the effectiveness of a minimum wage: some believe it helps to combat poverty, others say that it increases poverty because minimum wage level regulation creates job losses: the price of labor will be higher than the price that would be fixed by unhindered supply and demand of labor (read here why this is supposed to be the case). And job losses mean more poverty. However, the evidence for this is mixed, to say the least. See here, here, here or here for studies that show no adverse employment effects of a minimum wage.
In the U.S., when state and federal regulations differ, the higher of the two rates applies. Currently (2009), the “minimum minimum wage” is $7.25 per hour. A minority of states has minimum wages higher than the federal minimum.
An updated version of the map:
“Don’t play with your food!”, an apple globe
More on famine. More on the right to food. More human rights maps.
share of women in parliament, change between 1997 and 2011
Here’s another version:
And yet another version:
And this is the detail for the U.S.:
Parliament is obviously just one part of government. How about gender equality in other parts?
Read more about the reasons why this is a human rights issue.
In 2003, the U.S. Supreme Court’s Decision in Lawrence v. Texas invalidated the so-called “sodomy laws” that were still in force in 14 States at the time. In the decades before that, the other States gradually abolished their laws voluntarily. Here’s an overview:
The following 14 states still have sodomy laws on the books to this day:
Following Lawrence these laws became unenforceable, but one can see them as signaling official disapproval by the government of homosexuality.
Thanks to Lawrence, the U.S. compares favorably with the 80 or so other countries in the world where homosexuality is still illegal and where punishment for this “crime” can be very severe.
More on the legality or criminalization of homosexuality here. More on homophobia. More human rights maps.
The maps below show - for the years 1920, 1980 and 2000 – the percentages of foreign born populations in the different counties of the US (foreign born by country/continent of origin). You’ll have to click on the images to enlarge them. A fantastic interactive version is here (where you can see the actual numbers for a specific county, select a specific country of origin, look at other years etc.).
Other immigration maps are here and here. More textual information on the subject is here. Statistics on migration (in the US and worldwide) are here. An explanation of why this is a human rights issue is here. Other human rights maps are here.
And a slightly dated version:
Some similar maps here, here and here. More serious maps on human rights are here. More on prejudice (including the famous Allport’s scale). And, to be fair on Americans, something about anti-americanism.
child poverty rates in the U.S.
child poverty rates in the U.S.
“Being poor” meaning having an income below the federal poverty level, which is about $20,000 a year for a family of four. Which is quite stingy:
A poverty line, or poverty threshold, is the minimum level of income deemed necessary to achieve an adequate standard of living in a given country.
Determining the poverty line is usually done by finding the total cost of all the essential resources that an average human adult consumes in one year. This approach is needs-based in that an assessment is made of the minimum expenditure needed to maintain a tolerable life. This was the original basis of the poverty line in the United States, whose poverty threshold has since been raised due to inflation. (source)
More about the U.S. poverty line here.
Compared to other countries, the U.S. has always been very active in foreign policy, with varying success, and for good and bad. In the days of the Cold War, the main concern was the containment of communism, and consecutive U.S. governments (of both parties) were pleased to support gruesome right wing dictators all over the world (“he may be a bastard but he’s our bastard”).
However, after the collapse of communism in the 1990s, the U.S. began to understand that dictatorship and rights violations abroad, even of the non-communist type, are contrary to the national interest of the U.S., and also a moral problem in their own right. It is now generally accepted in the U.S. that the promotion of respect for human rights in other countries should be one of the major aims of foreign policy, and that intervention of some kind in the business of other countries can be justified if this is necessary for human rights (especially in cases of gross violations such as genocide).
Yet many in the U.S. worry about foreign “adventures”, even if human rights are at stake. Here is a poll showing decreasing levels of support for human rights as a foreign policy priority. And below is a very unscientific but funny measure of how much U.S. citizens care about the rest of the world:
Here and here are posts on humanitarian intervention, a type of intervention limited to the most extreme rights violations, often involving military force.
And how New Yorkers see it – a lot of empty space apparently, just good enough to fly over:
Saul Steinberg’s View of the World from 9th Avenue cover for The New Yorker, March 1976
And how Americans see Europe:
And the rest of the world:
And how Ronald Reagan saw the world:
Of course, when you laugh at the way people see some other people, you’re being just as prejudiced. Hence, here’s an anti-prejudice map (click to enlarge):
Another anti-stereotype map:
And another:
More on prejudice (including the famous Allport’s scale). More on religious freedom. More on national unity.
When diplomats lose their economic inhibitions and, exceptionally, replace economic self-interest by moral courage and criticize China for its human rights record at home (or, increasingly, abroad as well), or even when a government official simply meets the Dalai Lama without saying anything about China, it is as if the Chinese government plays a set of prerecorded responses. Every time, one hears the same, stale phrases about “intervening in the internal affairs of a sovereign country”, “hurting the feelings of the Chinese people”, “insulting the dignity of our nation,” and “disrespecting our people and their principles”. A Chinese blogger went through The People’s Daily (the Chinese version of the Pravda) to see which country is most disrespectful of China. On the first place is Japan, followed by the U.S. and NATO. But many countries seem to lack respect:
More on children’s rights.
Percentage of women aged 20-24 who were married or in union before the age of 18 (period 1987 to 2006):
Another version:
More on child marriage (see also here).
A state religion (also called an official religion, established church or state church) is a religious body or creed officially endorsed by the state. These are the countries that have a state religion:
Whether or not a country has a state religion can, of course, have consequences for religious freedom and religious plurality. See this post on religious freedom for more information.
Perhaps a more up-to-date map is this one:
Some states still use the gas chamber:
Here are the actual executions by gas chamber after the moratorium in the 1970s:
I think only Idaho and Oklahoma still use the firing squad. There recently was a convict in Utah who chose to be executed by firing squad. The U.S. Supreme Court, which reinstated the death penalty in 1977, banned the use of the firing squad in 2004. It allowed only a handful of inmates already on death row to opt for the method.
And this is the map for electrocution:
A more theoretical post on the supposed merits of capital punishment and its deterrent effect is here. Other human rights maps are here.
Here’s what the rest of the world thinks of killing children that have committed a crime:
Roper v. Simmons, 543 U.S. 551 (2005), was a decision in which the Supreme Court of the United States held that it is unconstitutional to impose capital punishment for crimes committed while under the age of 18.
A more theoretical discussion of capital punishment is here.
These are obviously pre-recession data. Data for 2008/9 show big increases (see also here):
More on homelessness.
In 2012, there were 28.8 million internally displaced people worldwide. This record high includes a five-fold increase in Syria due to the conflict there.
Some older numbers:
AFRICA contains half of the world’s Internally Displaced Persons (IDPs)—those who have fled their homes but continue to live in their own countries. Sudan alone has over 4m of them, about the same number as the whole of Asia. Congo has another 2m or so, Somalia at least 1.3m. A score of other countries including Uganda, Zimbabwe and Kenya have hundreds of thousands more. In sum, there are about 12m IDPs across the continent. (source)
As these numbers tend to fluctuate a lot, because of the nature of the problem, here’s an update (dated February 2010):
The legend is a bit hard to read, so here’s what it says: number of girls per 100 boys in primary school in 2001 (couldn’t find a more recent map), light to dark: 97 or more, 90 to 97, 80 to 90, 70 to 80, less than 70.
More on gender equality.
Look here for more recent data. The killing of journalists violates freedom of speech in several ways. Obviously the freedom of speech of the journalists concerned is violated, but the purpose of these killings is the message it sends to other journalists (close colleagues of those who are killed but all other journalists as well) and to the general public: “shut up if you want to be safe”. It’s the ultimate chilling effect.
The International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights is, together with the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights, the world’s main human rights treaty. Special about this treaty is that it includes so-called economic rights such as the right to a decent standard of living, the right to work, the right to a fair wage etc. Regular readers of this blog will know that we consider these rights to be very important (especially the right to a certain standard of living, i.e. the right not to suffer poverty).
Since it is a treaty, the Covenant imposes legal obligations on member states. More specifically, it forces them to work towards the implementation of these economic rights. As you can see from this map, a large majority of countries in the world have accepted and ratified this treaty (some have signed the treaty but have yet failed to ratify it), which means that they are bound by the rules that it contains. So-called “states-parties” have a legal obligation to respect the human rights mentioned in this treaty. The treaty (or ”covenant”) is, unlike the Universal Declaration which is its origin, a piece of law, and part of the international system of law.
The International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights is the world’s main human rights treaty. As you can see from this map, a large majority of countries in the world have accepted and ratified this treaty (some have signed the treaty but have yet failed to ratify it), which means that they are bound by the rules that it contains. So-called “states-parties” have a legal obligation to respect the human rights mentioned in this treaty. The treaty (or ”covenant”) is, unlike the Universal Declaration which is its origin, a piece of law, and part of the international system of law. See also this post on what is called the normative universality of human rights.
These are the countries that are not yet state-parties (in bold the countries that have signed up but failed to ratify):
Remittances are money sent back home by migrant workers. Sometimes these amounts are more important than foreign aid and some developing countries are heavily dependent on them in the sense that remittances represent a large share of their national income or GDP.
More on remittances here.
The Global Peace Index, created by the Economist Intelligence Unit, is based on 24 indicators measuring peace inside and outside of a country. They include the number of wars a country was involved in the past five years, how many soldiers were killed overseas and how much money was made in arms sales. Domestic indicators include the level of violent crimes, relations with neighboring countries and level of distrust in other citizens.
This are the maps for 2009 and 2010:
global peace index map 2009
global peace index map 2009
Here’s another version:
An interactive version is here or here. More on peace is here.
UPDATE: As these things can evolve quite rapidly, here’s an updated version of the US map, dated January 2010:
This map takes into account the California repeal of 2008 (California is still partially colored in purple in the first map above), as well as the granting of marriage rights in Iowa in 2009 and in some East coast states.
Here’s another version, comparing the degrees of restrictions on the rights of same sex couples in the different states of the U.S. (there’s a lot of variation between the extremes of a total refusal to grant couples any sort of recognition and a legal right to marry):
UPDATE:
UPDATE: and this is the situation dd. Februari 2012:
This is a very detailed map:
UPDATE: during the Presidential election today, November 7th 2012, Maine and Maryland also voted on ballot initiatives regarding same-sex marriage. Majorities of voters in both states approved it.
UPDATE: here’s an animated map for the years up to 2013:
More on same-sex marriage rights here, here, here and here. More on homosexuality laws. More on gay rights.
There’s also an interactive map here, with some more detail per country. More on nuclear war.
This map, compiled by Wm. Robert Johnston, and last updated 24 August 2008, shows the worst terrorist attacks, worst meaning attacks resulting in 100 or more fatalities:
Legend:
There’s another list of terrorist attacks here. Below is this list in map form:
Here’s another map showing the number of non-state terrorist incidents in the period 2000–2008:
More on terrorism.
And, expressed as a percentage of a country’s population, for 2005:
And for 2008:
Estimated HIV-AIDS prevalence among young adults 15-49 by country as of 2008
2009:
This is the evolution of new infections:
More on the human rights situation in Africa in general and in Darfur in particular. And something on the correlation between concern and closeness. And here is someone else who can’t tell exactly where Darfur and Sudan are situated on a map.
Where do they come from:
Where are they:
More data on immigration, legal and illegal.
More information on the human rights implications of migration is here, here, and here.
