Measuring justice
From worldwide protests against police brutality to a global pandemic and economic downturn, 2020 has been a tumultuous year for human rights. In the face of it all, EHF Fellow, Anne-Marie Brook, and her colleagues are rolling out a first-of-its-kind global human rights monitoring system to ensure countries around the world are held to account for how they treat people.
Most countries around the world keep a sharp eye on their economy -- measuring financial indicators like GDP, unemployment rates, and job growth. But financial stability is just one aspect of a country’s wellbeing. For a country to truly flourish, there needs to be a much wider understanding of what people need to live full lives - and better ways of measuring progress.
EHF Fellow Anne-Marie Brook is a former economist with a passion for helping to bring about systemic change. She and two world-leading human rights experts - Dr Susan Randolph and Dr K. Chad Clay - started the Human Rights Measurement Initiative (HRMI - pronounced ‘her-mee’) when they recognized a gap in human rights data.
“Until we founded HRMI, the world didn’t have a simple, transparent way to monitor how people are treated,” she explains, “This was a problem. When something is not measured, it is easily overlooked and undervalued.”
HRMI works to produce a free, easy-to-access database of metrics, summarising human rights performance in countries around the world. These statistics can then be used by anyone - government policy advisors, journalists, human rights advocates, investors, or concerned citizens - to identify issues their country can work on and call for change.
Which human rights to measure?
The UN defines human rights as such rights that are ‘inherent in our nature’ and ‘allow us to fully develop and use our human qualities, intelligence, talents, and conscience to satisfy our spiritual and other needs’.
At the moment, HRMI publishes metrics for 13 rights including five economic and social rights: education, food, health, housing and work; and eight civil and polical rights that include freedom of expression and assembly, participation in government, and freedom from arbitrary arrest, torture, extrajudicial killing, and the death penalty.
Anne-Marie says they have plans to expand in three directions: measuring more rights, for more countries, in more detail. HRMI aims to eventually measure all rights in international law, including specialist treaties protecting the rights of women and girls; people with disabilities; indigenous people; children, and more. The latest HRMI workstream is one measuring SOGIESC rights: the rights relating to sexual orientation, gender identity and expression, and sex characteristics.
Black Lives Matter and data to start a movement
HRMI as an organisation is in a unique position. While their internal concern is for human rights to improve around the world, they do not operate at the advocacy end of the spectrum.
They don’t take their findings to governments and push for particular changes, instead, they offer their data freely online so that governments, academics, journalists, and citizens have the accurate information they need to make positive change.
Last year HRMI data was used in an article by Vox News, highlighting how poorly the US scores in several categories - particularly in relation to voter suppression and police violence against people of colour.
“It’s a worrying sign,” the article reads, “that for all its resources and reputation for democracy, the US is not doing all that well in the world when it comes to human rights.”
That realization is exactly the kind of impact Anne-Marie and her team want to contribute to the world. They give countries the opportunity to see hard data on their performance, in the hope that movements of change will come from them.
“Our main focus is on closing a data gap that is detrimental to billions of citizens around the globe.”
The number of Black Lives Matter protests in the United States and around the world, in the past few months, is an encouraging sign that change is possible, and a reminder that bringing injustice into the light can have an impact.
“You’re not going to get change without the broad population having an awareness of those issues.”
Anne-Marie says that their team often uses the slogan, What gets measured, gets improved.
“When people have information on human rights in front of them it makes it easier to ask the right questions and seek out the best solutions.”
Human rights and COVID-19
One of the more unprecedented human rights issues to emerge this year is the way countries have responded to the global COVID-19 outbreak. When HRMI’s next expert survey goes into the field in February 2021 it will collect data on country respect for human rights throughout the pandemic. This will help to build understanding of the tricky balance between positive restrictions and protecting freedoms.
It’s still too early to say definitively, but Anne-Marie speculates that the countries that have emphasised the wellbeing of people in their COVID-19 response have done relatively well in terms of getting the virus under control and thus hopefully will face less damaging economic consequences.
Sweden and Denmark, for example, are two very similar countries who handled the pandemic very differently. Denmark mandated strong lockdown procedures, while Sweden kept their economy open. As a result, Denmark’s death rate has been substantially lower while the economic impact has been roughly the same in both countries.
Anne-Marie says their group has also heard of many governments taking advantage of the pandemic to unreasonably restrict people’s rights -- particularly in countries that already show little respect for human rights.
“As the pandemic passes and we enter the recovery phase, our data will be able to really track the extent to which countries lift those restrictions or continue to crack down on civic freedoms.”
What gets measured, gets improved
Anne-Marie expects that in the coming years, more people will gravitate toward HRMI’s extensive database to add statistical fodder to their cause. Numbers help leaders pay attention. HRMI is providing important tools to help countries pursue true flourishing for all their people.
How to get involved:
HRMI’s data is available for free at rightstracker.org.
Follow them on social media: @rightsmetrics
You can find out more information about their organisation and donate to their research at humanrightsmeasurement.org
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