Human Rights And Statistics

Effective human rights advocacy and research require the use of statistics, carefully collected and objectively analyzed and presented, using the best techniques available. Statistics that lack credibility are of little value. Those that can be defended against critics can be effective in throwing the light on violations and promoting the observance of human rights for all. The contributors to this book, including experts in political science, public health, law, forensic pathology, and statistics, illustrate good statistical practice in the field of human rights and show the importance of collaboration between statisticians and other professionals. The treatment is largely nonmathematical, and the examples provide broad coverage of all features of the collection and use of statistical data on human rights violations. For readers who would like to do their own analyses, an extensive guide to human rights data sources is included. This book is the first to describe and summarize important issues associated with the collection and uses of human rights statistics.

Human rights issues are shaping the modern world. They define the expectations by which nations are judged and affect the policy of governments, corporations, and foundations. Statistics is central to the modern perspective on human rights. It allows researchers to measure the effect of health care policies, the penetration of educational opportunity, and progress towards gender equality. This book describes the statistics that underlie the social science research in human rights. It includes case studies, methodology, and research papers that discuss the fundamental measurement issues.

The measurement of human rights has long been debated within the various academic disciplines that focus on human rights, as well as within the larger international community of practitioners working in the field of human rights. Written by leading experts in the field, this is the most up-to-date and comprehensive book on how to measure human rights. Measuring Human Rights: draws explicitly on the international law of human rights to derive the content of human rights that ought to be measured contains a comprehensive methodological framework for operationalizing this human rights content into human rights measures includes separate chapters on the methods, strengths and biases of different human rights measures, including events-based, standards-based, survey-based, and socio-economic and administrative statistics covers measures of civil, political, economic, social and cultural rights includes a complete bibliography, as well as sources and locations for data sets useful for the measurement of human rights. This volume offers a significant and timely addition to this important area of work in the field of human rights, and will be of interest to academics and NGOs, INGOs, international governmental organizations, international financial institutions, and national governments themselves.

"The basic structure of the Guide is geared towards supporting a systematic and comprehensive translation of universal human rights standards into indicators that are contextually relevant. This approach favours using objective information which is easily available, or can be collected, for monitoring the national implementation of human rights. This requires the reader to: [1] Understand the conceptual approach so as to identify indicators, after developing a preliminary understanding of the human rights normative framework; [2] Explore the alternative data-generating methods to populate the selected indicators; and [3] Apply and interpret the numbers that go with an indicator so as to build an assessment on the state of human rights."--Page 8.

Winner of the 2007 Gustavus Myers Outstanding Book Award for advancing human rights

This book considers contested responsibilities between the public and private sectors over the use of online data, detailing exactly how digital human rights evolved in specific European states and gradually became a part of the European Union framework of legal protections. The author uniquely examines why and how European lawmakers linked digital data protection to fundamental human rights, something heretofore not explained in other works on general data governance and data privacy. In particular, this work examines the utilization of national and European Union institutional arrangements as a location for activism by legal and academic consultants and by first-mover states who legislated digital human rights beginning in the 1970s. By tracing the way that EU Member States and non-state actors utilized the structure of EU bodies to create the new norm of digital human rights, readers will learn about the process of expanding the scope of human rights protections within multiple dimensions of European political space. The project will be informative to scholar, student, and layperson, as it examines a new and evolving area of technology governance – the human rights of digital data use by the public and private sectors.

Provides a roadmap for understanding the relationship between technology and human rights law and practice. This title is also available as Open Access.