NGO Roundtable – Measuring global human rights trends and the impact of the global human rights system

Commentary on the worldwide human rights situation is often characterised by assertions of an unfoldin g human rights crisis in much of the developing world, and back-sliding in some of the world’s major democracies. Clearly human rights violations are far too commonplace in all parts of the world, and we have a long way to go to realise the vision set out more than seventy years ago by the architects of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. But is it correct, as some would have us believe, that the global situation of human rights is worse today than it was five, ten or even fifty years ago? The short answer is: without better empirical measures of human rights performance, we do not know and, indeed, we cannot know.

Measuring human rights performance is not, however,  straightforward. Therefore on the 17th of June, URG will be holding an NGO roundtable on the empirical measurement of human rights trends around the world. During the session, Anne-Marie Brook of the Human Rights Measurement Initiative (HRMI) will present HRMI’s groundbreaking work to apply human rights indicators for a range of CPR and ESCR, and thus measure human rights progress/regression around the world. She will also offer ideas on how the HRMI data-set might be used by civil society.