Human rights indicators are central to the application of human rights standards in context and relate essentially to measuring human rights realization, both qualitatively and quantitatively. They offer an empirical or evidence-based dimension to the normative content of human rights legal obligations and a provide means of connecting those obligations with empirical data and evidence, and in this way relate to human rights accountability and the enforcement of human rights obligations. Human rights indicators are important both for assessment and diagnostic purposes: the assessment function of human rights indicators relates to their use in monitoring accountability, effectiveness and impact, while the diagnostic purposes relates to measuring the current state of human rights implementation and enjoyment in a given context, whether regional, country-specific or local. This paper offers a preliminary review of the foregoing in the development context, and a general perspective on the significance of human rights indicators for development processes and outcomes. It is not intended to be prescriptive and does not provide specific operational recommendations on the use of human rights indicators in development projects. Nor does it advocate a particular approach or mode of integrating human rights in development, or argue for a rights-based approach to development. This paper is designed to provide development practitioners with a preliminary view on the possible relevance, design and use of human rights indicators in development policy and practice. It also introduces a basic conceptual framework about the relationship between rights and development, including in the World Bank context and surveys a range of methodological approaches on human rights measurement, exploring in general terms different types of human rights indicators and their potential implications for development at three different levels of convergence or integration.

This collection addresses human rights and development for researchers, policymakers and activists at a time of major challenges. ÔCritical issuesÕ in the title signifies both the urgency of the issues and the need for critical rethinking. After exploring the overarching issues of development and economic theory, gender, climate change and disability, the book focuses on issues of technology and trade, education and information, water and sanitation, and work, health, housing and food.

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.

This book is devoted to the 25th anniversary of the United Nations Declaration on the Right to Development. It contains a collection of analytical studies of various aspects of the right to development, which include the rule of law and good governance, aid, trade, debt, technology transfer, intellectual property, access to medicines and climate change in the context of an enabling environment at the local, regional and international levels. It also explores the issues of poverty, women and indigenous peoples within the theme of social justice and equity. The book considers the strides that have been made over the years in measuring progress in implementing the right to development and possible ways forward to make the right to development a reality for all in an increasingly fragile, interdependent and ever-changing world.

The eleventh edition in the series, the Human Development Report 2000: Human Development and Human Rights provides a thought provoking analysis of these two interrelated and intertwined issues. Human rights and human development are mutually reinforcing and culminate in enlarged human freedom. The Report traces the history of struggle for human rights as a common human experience and outlines the new frontier of the rights agenda for the 21st Century. HDR 2000 demonstrates the ways in which human rights enrich human development goals: adding moral force and ideas of claims, duties and obligations. Human development, in turn, brings a dynamic long-term perspective to human rights and adds more concrete analysis, quantification, and must consider the human rights impacts of policy choices. The Report analyses how human rights must be respected, protected and promoted in the development process. To that end, it addresses the accountability of governments to fulfill their duties, and provides a timely analysis of the duties and obligations of newer actors in the fields of human rights and human development such as corporations, NGOs, individuals, the international community and markets. Of particular importance is consideration of how the current global economic rules and institutions address human rights issues. The Report proposes strategies for promoting development that also protect and further human rights, with significant implications for a pro-human rights approach to development. HDR 2000 includes and updates the widely respected Human Development Indicators that compare the relative levels of human development in most countries of the world, and presents data tables on all aspects of human development.

"The basic structure of the Guide is geared towards supporting a systematic and comprehensive translation of universal human rights standards into indicators that are contextually relevant. This approach favours using objective information which is easily available, or can be collected, for monitoring the national implementation of human rights. This requires the reader to: [1] Understand the conceptual approach so as to identify indicators, after developing a preliminary understanding of the human rights normative framework; [2] Explore the alternative data-generating methods to populate the selected indicators; and [3] Apply and interpret the numbers that go with an indicator so as to build an assessment on the state of human rights."--Page 8.