The goal of the CIRIGHTS data project is to create numerical measures for every international 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.
This report is aimed at introducing many of the human rights coded in the CIRIGHTS project and the human rights measures that are available to the public. We describe each right, and provide some examples of violations as well as data visualization of these rights around the world. We hope that teachers, journalists, policy makers, NGOs, and activists will use this data to help improve human rights around the globe.
Scoring Team
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).
Current Research Team
Ekaterina Sylvester, Mary Lind, Yulia Avvakumova, Lina Al Taan Al Hariri, Jack Cox, Max Ludwig
CIRIGHTS 