Conclusion

It is clear from this volume that the measurement of human rights is a thriving and burgeoning field involving scholars and practitioners from academic institutions across the disciplines of political science, sociology, economics and statistics; international and domestic non-governmental organizations; intergovernmental organizations such as the World Bank, the United Nations and the European Commission; and governments themselves, either as donors or as recipient countries engaged in state party reporting on human rights, drafting and implementing Poverty Reduction Strategy Papers (PRSPs), or governance assessments and human rights analysis. The chapters presented here have tried to outline, synthesize and evaluate the existing efforts at measuring human rights, in a way that is grounded in a set of assumptions that recognize the importance of the international law of human rights and the many ways in which the implementation of human rights varies across the many different cultural contexts of the world. The core chapters on existing human rights measures, in their own way, have shown that there is now a large body of work that uses the standard tools of the social sciences and statistics to provide valid, reliable and meaningful measures of human rights. However, it is also clear from this volume that as the sources and levels of

information have become more robust, the human rights community needs to continue to improve the degree to which it monitors, measures and analyses human rights. Indeed, we believe that there are a series of conceptual, methodological and policy lessons that emerge from this book that, when heeded, can help improve and strengthen existing efforts at measurement and lead to new initiatives that are more sensitive to the issues of measurement addressed here. We have shown that we now know more about what to measure conceptually and legally, than how to measure it. We also know that a large part of this human rights content remains unmeasured, and that those parts that are measured tend to rely too much on particular types of measures, which have a number of significant limitations that affect their validity, reliability and substantive meaning. In this way, the measurement project is incomplete and significant gaps exist and challenges remain for this exciting area of work. It is to these remaining issues that this final chapter addresses itself, arguing that policy analysis and implementation, human rights scholarship, and advocacy

Chapter 2 showed that there has been tremendous development in our understanding of the core content of human rights, which has moved on considerably since the idea of international human rights was formally articulated in the 1948 Universal Declaration of Human Rights and the subsequent international and regional instruments. This content has emerged through long and contested processes of consultation, adjudication and deliberation, in ways that have helped provide the systematized concepts necessary for the operationalization of human rights into indicators and eventually scores on units. The debates about human rights have moved beyond the simple distinction between and among the ‘generations’ of rights, the arguments that some rights are more important than others, and the idea that some rights are negative and some rights are positive. Rather, the thinking on human rights sees them much more holistically, where all rights are afforded equal status, that they are separate but often inter-related in complex ways, and that states have the legal obligation to respect, protect and fulfil all human rights. This final development has meant that the measurement effort has much work to do in finding solutions for measuring these three different state obligations. To date, existing measures are biased towards the measurement of civil and political rights, and the measures for these rights are biased towards the state obligation to respect, effectively ignoring the obligation to protect (i.e. from third-party violations) and to fulfil (i.e. state provision of resources into progressive realization). Those measures that have been developed for economic and social rights have tended to focus on the obligation to fulfil and have, therefore, ignored the obligations to respect and protect. Further conceptual work thus needs to be done on these underdeveloped dimensions of human rights in ways that will help devise measures for them.