Relativising human rights

Standards-based measures of country human rights performance yields a performance ranking for countries that is “absolute” or reflects the current state of human rights performance without taking into account the relative social, political, or economic conditions within countries. While absolute ranking is useful, it can lead to perverse outcomes in other areas of work. This article provides an alternative method for ranking country human rights performance that takes into account an array of additional variables that are related to the protection of civil and political rights. The method involves creating a relative score to compare different measures of human rights performance over time and across different regions. This approach leads to a view of relative human rights performance that should be of interest to human rights scholars and practitioners.

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