ABSTRACT
The previous chapter argued that human rights are moral claims that have been accorded legal recognition and that states are legally obliged to ensure that they respect, protect and fulfil these claims. The chapter sidestepped the thorny issue of the absence of agreed philosophical foundations for human rights and concentrated on what state and non-state actors have articulated about rights through the development of the international human rights law. In this way, the chapter argued that the content of human rights has been developed through the proliferation of international law and through the deliberations within international legal fora and the associated mechanisms and institutions for the enforcement of human rights. The empirical referents for measuring and monitoring human rights, however, are how these rights are protected in principle, realized in practice and promoted through policy (Landman 2004, 2006). The framework we develop as a result thus establishes and delineates the many categories, dimensions and principles of human rights that are in need of measurement, and further outlines different approaches to ‘operationalizing’ the content within the framework for the development of the measures themselves (i.e. basic rights, obligations, implementation and unique rights). Despite the development of a framework for the content, dimensions and
principles associated with human rights that ought to be measured, how is the concept of human rights converted into a measure and in what ways have human rights been measured to date? This chapter provides answers to these two questions. First, it adopts a model of measurement from Adcock and Collier (2001) to show how social scientific measurement moves through four different levels ranging from general background concepts (i.e. human rights), through systematized concepts (i.e. the core content of human rights) and their operationalization, to scores on human rights across units of analysis (e.g. a high score on civil rights CR " in country X in year T). Second, it provides a general overview of existing measures of human rights, including eventsbased measures, standards-based measures, survey-based measures, and socioeconomic and administrative statistics. Each of these examples has in some degree undergone the process of operationalization outlined here, while the discussion reveals how and why that process is vulnerable to problems of bias
of four present a much fuller discussion of each of these methods of measurement.
