ABSTRACT
Human rights conditions around the world remain a high-priority issue for the international community. One of the primary needs in this regard is reliable data that tracks practices. The two leading datasets are the Political Terror Scale (PTS) and the Cingranelli and Richards Physical Integrity Rights Index (CIRI), both of which provide ordinal measures coding physical integrity violations. The PTS employs a five-point scale, with higher scores indicating worse levels of human rights conditions. Separate scores are provided based on the information from the annual human rights reports of the US State Department, Amnesty International, and more recently, Human Rights Watch. The critics represent the nature of reporting as having changed in such a way that more violations ought to be detected in recent years than would be detected in earlier years. Evaluations of human rights conditions globally have remained relatively static according to both the PTS and CIRI.
