Measuring Human Rights

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.

Todd Landman is Professor in the Department of Government and a Member of the Human Rights Centre at the University of Essex. He is author of many books, including Studying Human Rights (2006), Protecting Human Rights (2005), and Issues and Methods in Comparative Politics (2000, 2003, and 2008).

Edzia Carvalho is currently researching her PhD on public health policy in India in the Department of Government at the University of Essex. She has an MA in Human Rights (Essex 2006), and an MA in International Relations (Mumbai 2003).