Measuring the impact of human rights

by Tim Shenk

Beth Simmons, professor of international affairs at Harvard University, at the 2010 Human Rights Impact Symposium / Nicole Schilit

The human rights movement is under increasing scrutiny as activists, donors and policymakers ask how human rights work can be measured and evaluated. Can human rights conditions be quantified and compared between different places and times? What can such measurements tell us, for example, about the practical effects of human rights treaties, advocacy campaigns or war crimes trials?

On May 11 and 12, 2010, The Institute for the Study of Human Rights hosted an academic symposium, “Human Rights Impact: General Issues and Sectoral Perspectives,” to discuss the measurement and impact of human rights. The symposium brought together nearly 50 activists, international policymakers and social scientists from fields including political science, anthropology, law and economics.

The goal was to foster a common conversation on these questions among diverse scholars and practitioners, according to ISHR Associate Director Yasmine Ergas.

“One contribution that an academic institution like ours can make is to highlight a divergence of perspectives which is not about determining who is right and wrong but how to have a particular conversation that can provide for different people’s knowledge needs,” she said.

The symposium included sessions on press freedom, international justice, women’s rights, measurement and indicators, development and ethical dilemmas. In each session, panelists discussed whether it is appropriate to quantify human rights and examined various attempts to do so.

Karin Deutsch Karlekar, a senior researcher at Freedom House, discussed her organization’s efforts to measure the level of journalistic freedom in countries around the world. Since 1980, Freedom House has produced an annual Freedom of the Press Index, assigning countries a numerical score based on their news media’s ability to operate freely and the public’s ability to access it.

While Karlekar acknowledged that these numbers can never perfectly reflect an abstract condition such as press freedom, she noted that the index has proven valuable in persuading governments to take the issue more seriously. For example, donors have denied aid to countries, such as The Gambia and Sri Lanka, because of low Freedom of the Press Index scores.

Sheila S. Coronel, director of the Stabile Center for Investigative Journalism, discussed the impact of press freedom on corruption. She noted that the impact of investigative journalism seems to vary according to a country’s political dynamics. According to one theory, investigative journalism can spur public engagement and political reform, but according to another, it leads to partisan scandal-mongering and a cynical electorate.

Coronel noted that efforts to protect journalists from violence has had mixed results. Human rights activists have succeeded in bringing more perpetrators to justice, but this has not reduced the number of journalists who are killed.

“In fact, I think the backlash to the free press is more violence against journalists,” Coronel said.

In the session on international justice, panelists discussed the extent to which putting human rights abusers on trial leads to greater respect for human rights throughout a society. Many noted the difficulty in quantifying or even identifying these effects. Robert O. Varenik, director of the Open Society Justice Initiative, called this “an unfair and unseemly question” but “also a necessary one to keep asking.”

Varenik noted that it is easier to win a judgment in court for one client than to reform a society. However, seeking accountability can have surprising effects. For example, Spain’s attempt to extradite the former Chilean dictator Augusto Pinochet spurred Chile to prosecute more than 100 former officials for human rights abuses, Varenik said.

Elise Keppler, senior international justice counsel for Human Rights Watch, described how her organization works with courts, civil society groups and the media to bring human rights abusers to justice. The collaborative nature of the work makes evaluation difficult. “It’s almost always impossible to assess the impact of our work as distinct from those other actors,” she said.

Kathryn Sikkink, professor of political science at the University of Minnesota, presented research to show that human rights prosecutions lead to greater respect for human rights. She also questioned studies that show a global deterioration in human rights conditions in recent years, arguing that this may be due to an “information effect” — the idea that human rights abuses are documented more accurately now than in the past.

Jack Snyder, professor of international relations at Columbia University, presented research on amnesties as an alternative to human rights prosecutions. Amnesties are often preferable when a conflict is ongoing and it is necessary to make political deals with human rights abusers, Snyder argued.

“Seventy percent of peace settlements since 1990 involve some sort of amnesty,” he said.

During the session on women’s rights, Beth Simmons, professor of international affairs at Harvard University, examined the question of whether ratifying the Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination Against Women (CEDAW) made a discernible difference in a country’s level of women’s rights. She found that ratifying CEDAW had a significant impact in states with a high level of rule of law, in semi-democratic, transitional states and in states with no official religion.

Simmons argued that CEDAW ratification led to changes by mobilizing women’s rights advocates to press for reforms. In some cases, CEDAW allowed activists to bring women’s rights cases to court. However, CEDAW ratification did not automatically improve women’s rights.

In the session on measurement and indicators, David Cingranelli presented the methodology of the CIRI Human Rights Data Project, which tracks human rights abuses using Amnesty International and State Department reports. Cingranelli noted broad trends from 1981 to 2006: torture increased, political imprisonment decreased, freedom of speech decreased and freedom of association and electoral self-determination increased.

Megan Price, a statistician for the Benetech Human Rights program, described her organization’s work to monitor the number of people killed in violent conflicts. These casualty counts often vary from organization to organization because the data are incomplete and unreliable. According to Price, the best approach is to use statistical projections based on multiple casualty counts or to conduct a thorough census.

Sally Engle Merry, professor of anthropology at New York University, argued that using numerical indicators will make human rights more abstract. Over time, the idea of human rights could be replaced by a score or a number. Margaret L. Satherwaite, associate professor of clinical law at the New York University School of Law, noted that indicators could fundamentally change the way human rights treaties are monitored. Instead of providing a legal opinion on a state’s compliance with human rights standards, treaty bodies will be asked to provide a technical measurement of their human rights performance.

In the session on human rights and development, Stefan Voigt, director of the Institute of Law and Economics at the University of Hamburg, presented research suggesting that better human rights conditions promote economic development. Like Simmons, Voigt found that human rights treaties improve human rights practices in a particular category of countries. According to Voigt, these are countries with a moderate amount of foreign direct investment. By improving human rights practices, these countries may be trying to increase investor confidence, he said.

The conference closed with a session on ethical dilemmas (see article on page 6) and conclusions.

According to Prof. Ergas, ISHR will continue to promote research on the impact of human rights work. The symposium highlighted differences of opinion between advocates and political scientists and showed the need for research into the ethical dilemmas of activism, such as the potential for unintended consequences, she said.

Good research will ultimately help the human rights movement learn from its decades of work.

“You have people who have given their lives to the movement and they want to have a sense of what they have done,” Ergas said. “The question is less, ‘Did this project succeed or fail?’ but rather, ‘What can we learn from what happened?’”

Published in RightsNews Volume 29, no. 1, October, 2010.
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