ABSTRACT
Social scientific analysis of human rights problems often depends on the use of valid, meaningful, and reliable measures of human rights across the different categories and different dimensions outlined in Chapter 1.1 There is now a large literature on human rights measurement that has developed through contributions from the academic disciplines of political science, sociology, economics, and law, as well as from governmental and non-governmental organizations (e.g. Claude and Jabine 1992; Green 2001; Landman and Häusermann 2003; Landman 2004). Long seen as the purview of development and economic analysis, the use of indicators has increasingly been brought into mainstream analysis of human rights in the social sciences and in the work of the United Nations and the World Bank. For example, since the late 1970s and early 1980s, political scientists have been using quantitative measures in global comparative analyses of human rights protection (see Chapter 6 in this volume). The 2000 Human Development Report dedicated an entire chapter on why human rights indicators are important and how they could be incorporated into its own work (UNDP 2000:89-111). The Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights has been exploring the ways in which human rights indicators could be used by the treaty monitoring bodies to assist in their assessments of state compliance with the different international human rights instruments. In his annual reports to the UN General Assembly, the Special Rapporteur on the Right to Health has advocated the use of indicators to gauge different aspects of the progressive realization of the right to health (A/58/427/2003; A/59/422/2004). Finally, the World Bank has incorporated measures of human rights in its work on good governance and its relationship with development (see Kaufmann et al. 1999a, 1999b, 2002, 2003; https://www.worldbank.org/).
