Extending the Human Rights Atlas

This project is a continuation of the ESRC-funded follow-on project Human Rights Atlas (ES/J000728/1) which has collated data on basic country statistics, legal comitments and human rights practices for all the countries and territories in the world for the period 1981 to 2011 [www.humanrightsatlas.org].

The continuation phase involves updating of the data in the main flat file and actively disseminating the Atlas to a primary user group in Latin America; assisting the user group in using the Atlas to map and analyse human rights issues in Latin America for the period 1990 to 2011; and working with two private organisations - The Mackman Group and the Thomson Reuters Foundation - to continue to raise awareness about the Atlas.

The Latin American user group is being coordinated by the Faculty of Social Sciences in Mexico City (FLACSO), which is mapping human rights in the region and identifying gaps in knowledge about human rights using comparative statistical indicators of the kind already collated in the Human Rights Atlas. The work involves a workshop in Mexico City with FLACSO and its network of its researchers. The region itself had undergone remarkable and dramatic political transformations over the period envisaged for this study, including extraction from prolonged periods of authoritarianism, processes of transitional justice, re-establishment and consolidation of democracy, structural adjustment and macro-economic recovery, and rapid economic development among big regional actors such as Mexico, Brazil, Argentina and Chile. The Atlas provides a systematic resource that addresses the main data needs of this research network.

The second main part of the project is to work with the Mackman Group (a private sector partner in the original Human Rights Atlas project) and the Thomson Reuters Foundation (the charitable fundation of the global media company Thomson Reuters) to disseminate the Atlas resource and raise awareness about cross-national human rights indicators for a wide range of users, including key organisations from the public and private sectors. This part of the project will take advantage of the Mackman Group's marketing technologies and Thomson Reuters' AlertNet resource, which is dedicated to the humanitarian sector around the world. In addition to the on-line promotional work, the project will also host a large London-based user engagement event hosted by Thomson Reuters in its Canary Wharf facility. This event will feature high profile global leaders from the humanitarian sector to discuss the needs of users for systematic data and data visualisation of the kind carried out by the original Atlas project.

This project engages in a series of applied interventions and awareness raising activities, including face to face meetings and knowledge exchange events in Mexico (with the Faculty of Social Sciences, FLACSO), the Thomson Reuters Foundation in London, international conferences, and press releases and electronic promotion through social media networks and email newsletter subscriptions.

The immediate beneficiaries of the project are scholars and practitioners working in the area of human rights, including academic researchers, PhD students, MA students, and researchers based at non-academic organisations. The project combines political, legal, social, and economic indicators in ways that allow for interrogation of the main data base and the generation of customised output. The Atlas is also of interest to non-governmental organisations, businesses, multinational corporations, and international financial institutions who are increasingly interested in human rights performance profiles of countries with whom they are actively engaged. To this end, the PI has over the last year been meeting with business and human rights professionals (e.g. a series of Mazar's events and meetings co-organised with Tomorrow's Company, and a Business and Human Rights workshop in St Gallen, Switzerland). A centralised provision of up to date information of this kind is a much needed resource for which there is growing demand. The Atlas can be used for research, education, policy making and other activities that have a bearing on the ways in which organisations based in the UK and abroad think and talk about human rights.

The extended Atlas includes regional pages to address the rapid sets of changes in the Middle East and North Africa, as well as those taking place in China and Burma. The FCO, DFID and the British Council have a keen interest The direct assistance provided to a network of Latin American researchers allows the Atlas team to take the resource to an active regional research network seeking to map human rights developments in a region that undergone dramatic political transformations over the last three decades. Engaging with Thomson Reuters through its AlertNet resource places the Atlas in the heart of the humanitarian on-line space with a recognised global media brand.