1 Introduction 1
Background developments 2
The purpose of measuring human rights 4
Overview of the book 6
2 The content of human rights 9
Introduction 9
The international human rights regime 10
Human rights in international law 16
The content of human rights 16
Rights in principle 19
Rights in policy 21
Rights in practice 23
Measurement complexity, validity and viability 24
The‘basic rights’argument 24
The‘obligations’argument 25
The‘implementation’argument 25
The‘unique rights’argument 26
Summary 30
3 Measuring human rights 31
The moment of measurement 32
Source material 34
Types of human rights measures 36
Events-based measures 37
Standards-based measures 37
Survey-based measures 38
Socio-economic and administrative statistics 39
Measuring to assess 40
Summary and the way forward 42
4 Events-based measures of human rights 45
Introduction 45
Events data in the social sciences 46
The methodology of events data 48
Source material 51
The use of events data 57
Assessing events data for measuring human rights 58
Summary 63
5 Standards-based measures 64
Introduction 64
Background: regime types and scales 65
Recent efforts: from freedom’to human rights 67
Freedom House 68
Political terror scale and the scale of torture 73
Cingranelli and Richards (CIRI) human rights data 77
Measuring the de jure human rights commitments of states 78
Uses and limitations of standards-based measures 86
6 Survey-based measures 91
Introduction 91
The familiarity of surveys 93
Survey design 97
Sampling 99
Inferences 102
Limitations to survey-based measures 105
7 Socio-economic and administrative statistics 107
Introduction 107
Official statistics in measurement and monitoring 108
Using official statistics to measure human rights 112
Aggregate statistics: measuring rights in practice 112
Disaggregate statistics: measuring rights in policy and practice 116
Assessing the use of official statistics 122
Summary 126
8 Conclusion 127
Conceptual lessons 128
Methodological lessons 128
Policy lessons 130
Summary 131
Further Resources 134
Notes 136
References 138
Index 157