The goal of the CIRIGHTS data project is to create numerical measures for every internationally recognized human right for all countries of the world. Human rights scores are necessary for understanding why national governments choose to violate human rights, why they choose to violate some rights more than others, and the consequences of human rights violations for other phenomena such as conflict and development. Numerical scores also are necessary for monitoring government performance, for evaluating the human rights consequences of policy interventions such as transitional justice programs, and for determining whether government protection of various rights is improving or declining.
The CIRIGHTS project aims to make our data broadly accessible, transparent, and easy to understand. We believe that human rights data can play an important role in educating the public about what obligations states have to their citizens. Unless people demand human rights governments are unlikely to provide them. As such it is imperative that people understand what human rights are (and what they are not), what different rights entail, and whether their government is meeting international human rights standards. We see this project as a necessary step towards creating greater human rights awareness, a useful tool for human rights education, and set of measures that can be used for testing human rights theories, and a way to evaluate whether human rights are improving or declining.
Principal Investigators
Dr. Skip Mark (University of Rhode Island), Dr. David L. Cingranelli (Binghamton University), Dr. Mikhail Filippov (Binghamton University), Dr. David Richards (University of Connecticut).
CIRIGHTS Researchers
CIRIGHTS Scores are produced by trained scorers at the University of Rhode Island, Binghamton University, and the University of Connecticut.
CIRIGHTS 