Human Rights Atlas

Our project proposes to create a unique web-based human rights atlas that provides basic country statistics, data on legal commitments and organisational membership, and measures on a wide range of human rights protection that goes beyond existing data resources. The atlas will allow users to generate customised output on countries of interest, compare the performance of countries against one another and to examine time series trends in country performance. The project is designed in phases that move from the provision of basic data, advanced data and reporting, to specialised and bespoke country analysis. The project follows on from ongoing work of the PI (Professor Todd Landman) who has extensive experience researching human rights measurement over many years (and has data sets upon which to build the current project) and the Co-I (Dr Andrew Fagan)'s research for an Atlas of Human Rights in book form (2010). Funding is sought for the first phase of the project which will collect existing data and create the online Atlas.

The increasing provision and availability of human rights measures has led to a new demand within the international human rights and donor communities, such as the United Nations, the World Bank, and the aid ministries in the US (USAID), UK (DFID), Sweden (SIDA), Canada (CIDA), and Denmark (DANIDA) to integrate human rights assessment into overall policy formulation and aid allocation strategies.

Many of these donors, such as DFID in the UK, now use human rights assessment in their aid programming to find ways in which different aid modalities can address particular needs within partner countries to improve the human rights situation while at the same time address larger questions of poverty reduction. In contrast, the Millennium Challenge Account uses human rights measures as an incentive to allocate aid to those countries that can demonstrate improvements in their human rights performance. And as mentioned above, the Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights in Geneva has been engaged in a long term process of consultation with international experts to provide matrices of human rights indicators for use in state party reports to the treaty monitoring bodies, while the UNDP's Oslo Governance Centre has produced guides on measures of good governance and human rights for use in their own country offices, as well as across the donor community more generally.

The Atlas would have clear potential to impact on the policy making process by providing easily accessible and understandable data that can provide bespoke country analysis.

In addition to these public sector organisations, private sector organisations such as international investment banks, multinational corporations, and other organisations (NGOs, think tanks, aid agencies and charities, media organisations) have become increasingly interested in non-market related indicators, such as those that are proposed to be included in the Human Rights Atlas. Emerging markets and the rise of the 'BRIC' countries (i.e. Brazil, Russia, India, and China) carry with them heightened attention to the issues surrounding the quality of governance, the protection of human rights, and the rule of law. There is thus demand from this sector for the same sort of country-level analysis.