A Readers GuideKing Leopolds Ghostby Adam Hochschild.docx

A Reader's Guide
King Leopold's Ghost
by Adam Hochschild
• Questions for Discussion
• Looking Back: A Personal Afterword
• About the Author
• A Conversation with Adam Hochschild
• Finalist, 1998 National Book Critics Circle Award for General
Nonfiction
• Winner, 1998 J. Anthony Lukas Prize
“An enthralling story, full of fascinating characters,intense
drama, high adventure,
deceitful manipulations,courageous truthtelling, and splendid
moral fervor . . . A work of
history that reads like a novel.” —Christian Science Monitor
“Carefully researched and vigorously told, King Leopold’s
Ghost does what good history
always does —expands the memory of the human race.” —
Houston Chronicle
Adam Hochschild’s awardwinning, hearthaunting account of the
brutal plunder of the
Congo by Leopold II of Belgium presents a megalomaniac of
monstrous proportions, a
royal figure as cunning, charming, and cruel as any of
Shakespeare’s great villains. It is

also the deeply moving portrait of those who fought Leopold: a
brave, committed handful
of idealists, missionaries, travelers, diplomats, and African
villagers who found themselves
witnesses to and, in too many instances, victims of a holocaust.
In the late 1890s, Edmund Dene Morel, a young British shipping
company agent, noticed
something strange about the cargoes of his company’s ships as
they arrived from and
departed for the Congo, Leopold II’s vast new African colony.
Incoming ships were
crammed with valuable ivory and rubber. Outbound ships
carried little more than soldiers
and firearms. Correctly concluding that only slave labor on a
vast scale could account for
these cargoes, Morel resigned from his company and almost
singlehandedly made
Leopold’s slavelabor regime the premier humanrights story in
the world. Thousands of
people packed hundreds of meetings throughout the United
States and Europe to learn
about Congo atrocities. Two courageous black Americans—
George Washington Williams
and William Sheppard—risked much to bring evidence to the
outside world. Roger
Casement, later hanged by Britain as a traitor, conducted an
eyeopening investigation of
the Congo River stations. Sailing into the middle of the story
was a young steamboat
officer named Joseph Conrad. And looming over all was
Leopold II, King of the Belgians,
sole owner of the only private colony in the world.
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Questions for Discussion
We hope the following questions will stimulate discussion for
reading groups and provide
a deeper understanding of King Leopold's Ghost for every
reader.
1. Between 1880 and 1920, the population of the Congo was
slashed in half: some ten
million people were victims of murder, starvation, exhaustion,
exposure, disease and a
plummeting birth rate. Why do you think this massive carnage
has remained virtually
unknown in the United States and Europe?
2. Hochschild writes of Joseph Conrad that he “was so horrified
by the greed and brutality
among white men he saw in the Congo that his view of human
nature was permanently
changed.” Judging from Hochschild’s account and from Heart of
Darkness, in whatway
was Conrad’s view changed? How is this true of other
individuals about whom Hochschild
writes? In what way has this book affected your view of human
nature?
3. The death toll in King Leopold’s Congo was on a scale

comparable to the Holocaust and
Stalin’s purges. Can Leopold II be viewed as a precursor to the
masterminds behind the
Nazi death camps and the Gulag? Did these three and other
twentiethcentury mass
killings arise from similar psychological, social, political,
economic, and cultural sources?
4. Those who plundered the Congo and other parts of Africa
(and Asia) did so in the name
of progress, civilization, and Christianity. Was this hypocritical
and if so, how? What
justifications for colonial imperialism and exploitation have
been put forward over the past
five centuries?
5. Morel, Sheppard, Williams, Casement, and others boldly
spoke out against the Congo
atrocities, often at great danger to themselves. Many others
rationalized those same
atrocities or said nothing. How do you account for Leopold’s,
Stanley’s, and others’
murderous rapaciousness, on the one hand, and Morel’s,
Casement’s, and others’ outrage
and committed activism, on the other?
6. The European conquest and plunder of the Congo and the rest
of Africa was brutal, but
so was the European settlement of North America and, long
before that, the conquest of
most of Europe by the Romans. Hasn’t history always proceeded
in this way?
7. Hochschild begins his book with what he calls Edmund
Morel’s “flash of moral
recognition” on the Antwerp docks. What other flashes of moral

recognition does
Hochschild identify, and what were their consequences? In what
ways may Hochschild’s
book itself be seen as a flash of moral recognition? What more
recent flashes of moral
recognition and indignation can you identify?
8. Hochschild quotes the Swedish missionary, C. N. Börrisson:
“It is strange that people
who claim to be civilized think they can treat their fellow man
— even though he is of a
different color — any which way.” How may we explain the
disregard of “civilized”
individuals and groups for the humanity and life of others
because of skin color,
nationality, religion, ethnic background, or other factors? Why
do this disregard and
resulting cruelties persist?
9. What are the similarities between the colonial and imperial
aspirations of pre- and early
twentieth-century nations and the corporate and market
aspirations of today’s
multinational companies? Whether rapacious or beneficent,
most actors in the Congo, and
in Africa at large, seem to have been motivated principally by
profit. In what ways do
business objectives continue to shape the policies and actions of
national governments
and international organizations?

10. Hochschild writes that Leopold “found a number of tools at
his disposal that had not
been available to empire builders of earlier times.” What new
technologies and
technological advances contributed to Leopold’s exploitation of
the Congo? What impact
have these tools had on both the advancement and degradation
of colonial or subject
peoples?
11. The “burgeoning hierarchy of imperial rule” in the Congo
Free State was, Hochschild
writes, reflected in “the plethora of medals” and attendant
grades and ranks. What were
the reasons for this extensive hierarchy and for the bureaucracy
it reflected and
maintained? Are there any contemporary parallels? Of what
historical examples can we
say that the more heinous the political or governmental crimes,
the larger and more
frequently rewarded the bureaucracy?
12. How does Hochschild answer his own question, “What made
it possible for the
functionaries in the Congo to so blithely watch the chicotte in
action and . . . to deal out
pain and death in other ways as well”? How would you answer
this question, in regard to
Leopold’s Congo and to other officially sanctioned atrocities?
13. Hochschild quotes Roger Casement as insisting to Edmund
Morel, “I do not agree with
you that England and America are the two great humanitarian
powers. . . . [They are]
materialistic first and humanitarian only a century after.” What
evidence supports or

refutes Casement’s judgment? Would Casement be justified in
making the same
statement today?
14. After stating that several other mass murders “went largely
unnoticed,” Hochschild
asks, “why, in England and the United States, was there such a
storm of righteous protest
about the Congo?” Do you find his explanation sufficient? Why
do some atrocities (the
mass murders in Rwanda, for example) prompt little response
from the United States and
other western nations, while others (the "ethnic cleansing" of
Kosovo, for example)
prompt military action against the perpetrators?
Looking Back: A Personal Afterword
IT IS NEARLY a decade since this book was first published.
When I began working on it, it
was surprisingly hard to get anyone interested. Of the ten New
York publishers who saw a
detailed outline of the book, nine turned it down. One suggested
the story might work
better as a magazine article. The others said there was no
market for books on African
history or simply felt Americans would not care about these
events so long ago, in a place
few could find on a map. Happily, the tenth publisher,
Houghton Mifflin, had more faith in
readers' ability to see connections between Leopold's Congo and
today. Macmillan, in
Britain, felt the same way. In English and eleven other
languages, more than 350,000
copies are now in print. The book has given rise to several films
(most notably Pippa

Scott's documentary King Leopold's Ghost), Web sites on
Congolese history in English and
French, a rap song, an avant-garde off-Broadway play, and a
remarkable sculpture by the
California artist Ron Garrigues: a bristling assemblage of ivory,
rubber, gun parts, spent
ammunition, bones, Bakongo carvings, and medals once
awarded by Leopold himself.
And the story continues to stay alive. Overlooking the beach at
Leopold's favorite resort
at Ostend, Belgium, has long stood a grand equestrian statue of
the king in bronze,
surrounded by smaller figures of grateful Africans and local
fishermen. One night in 2004,
some anarchists sawed the hand off one of the Africans — to
make the statue better
represent, they said in an anonymous fax, Leopold's real impact
on the Congo. For a
writer who at one point thought he might never get his book
published, it's been an
interesting ride.
I've sometimes wondered why those publishers said no. It may
have had to do with the
way most of us have been brought up to think that the tyrannies
of our time worth writing
about are communism and fascism. Unconsciously, we feel
closer to the victims of Stalin
and Hitler because they were almost all European. Consciously,

we think that communism
and fascism represented something new in history because they
caused tens of millions of
deaths and had totalitarian ideologies that censored all dissent.
We forget that tens of
millions of Africans had already died under colonial rule.
Colonialism could also be
totalitarian — what, after all, was more so than a forced labor
system? Censorship was
tight: an African in the Belgian Congo had no more chance of
advocating freedom in the
local press than a dissident in Stalin's Soviet Union.
Colonialism was also justified by an
elaborate ideology, embodied in everything from Kipling's
poetry and Stanley's lectures to
sermons and books about the shapes of skulls, lazy natives, and
the genius of European
civilization. And to speak, as Leopold's officials did, of forced
laborers as libérés, or
"liberated men," was to use language as perverted as that above
the gate at Auschwitz,
Arbeit Macht Frei. Communism, fascism, and European
colonialism each asserted the right
to totally control its subjects' lives. In all three cases, the
impact lingered long after the
system itself officially died.
I knew that many people had been affected by the colonial
regime in the Congo, but I did
not anticipate how the appearance of this book would open up to
me a whole world of
their descendants. I got a call one day from an American great-
grandson of the notorious
Léon Rom. E. D. Morel's granddaughter, who had been raised
largely by her grandmother,
Morel's widow, wrote a long letter. I found a hidden diaspora of

Congolese in the United
States; almost everywhere I spoke, a few lingered afterward,
then came up to talk.
Through some of them I was able to send copies of the book's
French-language edition to
schools and libraries in the Congo. In one California bookstore
there appeared a
multiracial group of people who seemed to know everything
about William Sheppard; it
turned out they were from a nearby Presbyterian congregation
that was a sister church to
his old mission station. I joined Swedish Baptists in Stockholm
as they celebrated the life
of the missionary E. V. Sjöblom, one of Leopold's earliest and
most courageous critics. At
a talk I gave in New York City, an elderly white woman came
up, leaned across the book-
signing table, and said forcefully in a heavy accent, "I lived in
the Congo for many years,
and what you say is all true!" She disappeared before I could
ask more. One day I came
home to find an African voice on my answering machine: "I
need to talk to you. My
grandfather was worked to death as a porter by the Belgians."
Most interesting of all was to see the reaction to the book in
Belgium, where it appeared
in the country's two main languages, French and Dutch. When I
went to Antwerp at the
time, the historian Jules Marchal (see pages 296–299) and I
found the spot on the city's

wharves where E. D. Morel had stood a hundred years earlier as
he tallied cargoes of
ivory and rubber arriving from the Congo, and I had the
stunning realization that he was
seeing the products of slave labor. Sadly, Marchal has since
died of cancer, but not before
beginning to get some of the recognition denied him for so long.
In both Antwerp and Brussels, I found audiences friendly,
concerned about human rights,
and uniformly apologetic that they had learned nothing in
school about their country's
bloody past in Africa. The newspaper reviews were positive.
And then the reaction set in.
It came from some of the tens of thousands of Belgians who had
had to leave the Congo
in a hurry, their world collapsed, when the colony won
independence in 1960. There are
some two dozen organizations of Belgian "old colonials," with
names like the Fraternal
Society of Former Cadets of the Center for Military Training of
Europeans at Luluabourg. A
coalition of those groups1 opened a Web site containing a long
diatribe against the book:
"sensationalist . . . an amalgam . . . of facts, extrapolations and
imaginary situations."
Another attack on the book's "mendacious stupidities" began
with a mournful aside
addressed to Leopold: "You who believed, after a very full life,
that you'd be able to finally
enjoy eternal rest, you were mistaken."2 A provincial old-
colonial newsletter said, "The
dogs of Hell have been unleashed again against the great
king."3

The British newspaper the Guardian4 published a lengthy article
about how "a new book
has ignited a furious row in a country coming to grips with its
colonial legacy." It quoted
Professor Jean Stengers, a conservative Africa scholar,
denouncing the book: "In two or
three years' time, it will be forgotten." The Belgian prime
minister clearly wanted the row
to end. "The colonial past is completely past," he told the paper.
"There is really no strong
emotional link any more. . . . It's history."
But the history wouldn't go away. At a United Nations
conference on racism in Durban,
South Africa, in 2001, a journalist noted5 that many delegates
had read the book; one of
them asked Belgian Foreign Minister Louis Michel if his
country took responsibility for
Leopold's "crimes against humanity." The same year, Michel
sent a confidential
memorandum to Belgian diplomatic missions throughout the
world on how to answer
embarrassing questions coming from readers of King Leopold's
Ghost and Heart of
Darkness. (His instructions: a proactive public relations effort
would be futile; instead,
change the subject to Belgium's work for peace in Africa today.)
Other events have also helped put the colonial past on the
agenda in Belgium. The year
after this book appeared, a Belgian writer, Ludo De Witte,
published The Assassination of
Lumumba, which disclosed a wealth of new, incriminating
material about Belgian
complicity in the death of the Congo's first democratically
chosen prime minister. The next

year, a feature film by the director Raoul Peck brought the story
of Lumumba's short life
and martyr's end to a wider audience. In 2001, a Belgian
parliamentary investigation
verified many of De Witte's findings, and the government issued
an official apology. The U.
S. government, however, which also pushed hard for the prime
minister's assassination,
has never apologized.
All of this raised uncomfortable questions for the institution
that I described on pages
292–293, the Royal Museum for Central Africa. The museum
was under conflicting
pressures: from the old-colonial lobby, determined to continue
celebrating Belgium's
period of rule over the Congo; from many Belgians, including
younger members of the
museum's own staff, who thought it was time for drastic
changes; from government
officials worried about the country's image; and, it was
rumored, from the royal family. In
1999, a museum official acknowledged that possible changes in
its exhibits were under
study, "but absolutely not because of the recent disreputable
book by an American."6 Two
years later, the government appointed a new director. In a long
stream of newspaper
interviews he promised a complete revamping.
In 2005, with much fanfare, the museum mounted a large

temporary exhibit, "Memory of
the Congo: The Colonial Era," simultaneously publishing a
lavishly illustrated book of the
same name. Both exhibit and book were examples of how to
pretend to acknowledge
something without really doing so. Among the hundreds of
photographs the museum
displayed, for instance, were four of the famous atrocity
pictures from Morel's slide show.
But these were shown small, and more than a dozen other
photos — almost all of
innocuous subjects, like Congolese musicians — were blown up
to life size. Another
picture showed a hearing by Leopold's 1904–1905 Commission
of Inquiry, which a caption
praised as "a pioneering initiative in the history of human rights
in Central Africa." But
there was nothing about the king's duplicitous efforts (see pages
251–252) to sabotage
the release of the commission's findings. The museum's book
had a half-page photo of
Captain Léon Rom — but made no mention of his collection of
severed African heads, the
gallows he erected in his front yard, or his role as a possible
model for Conrad's
murderous Mr. Kurtz. Exhibit and book justly celebrated
William Sheppard as a pioneer
lay anthropologist, but said nothing about his role as a target of
the legal case I've
described on pages 259–265. The book contained more than
three dozen scholarly
articles about everything from the bus system of Leopoldville to
the Congo's national
parks. But not a single article — nor a single display case in the
museum — was devoted
to the foundation of the territory's colonial economy, the forced

labor system. Nowhere in
either book or exhibit could you find the word "hostage." This
does not leave me
optimistic about seeing the Congo's history fully portrayed by
the Royal Museum in the
future.7 But colonialism seldom is, anywhere. Where in the
United States can you find a
museum exhibit dealing honestly with our own imperial
adventures in the Philippines or
Latin America?
Looking back on this book after an interval of some years has
reminded me of where I
wish I could have done more. My greatest frustration lay in how
hard it was to portray
individual Africans as full-fledged actors in this story.
Historians often face such
difficulties, since the written record from colonizers, the rich,
and the powerful is always
more plentiful than it is from the colonized, the poor, and the
powerless. Again and again
it felt unfair to me that we know so much about the character
and daily life of Leopold and
so little about those of Congolese indigenous rulers at the time,
and even less about the
lives of villagers who died gathering rubber. Or that so much is
on the record about
Stanley and so little about those who were perhaps his nearest
African counterparts: the
coastal merchants already leading caravans of porters with
trading goods into the interior
when he first began staking out the Congo for Leopold. Of those
who worked against the
regime, we know the entire life stories of Europeans or
Americans like Morel, Casement,

and Sheppard, but almost nothing of resistance leaders like
Kandolo or Mulume Niama
who lost their lives as rebels. This skews the story in a way
that, unintentionally, almost
seems to diminish the centrality of the Congolese themselves.
I wrestled with this problem repeatedly while writing the book
and have no better solution
to it now. There are fine anthropological studies of various
Congolese peoples, but the
biographical record on individual Africans from this era is
scanty. A history based on
characters must be mainly the story of King Leopold and those
of his supporters or
opponents who were European or American. If we are to enter
deeply into the personal
lives of individual Congolese in this period, it may have to be
done in fiction, as novelists
like Chinua Achebe have done for the colonial era elsewhere in
Africa, or as Toni Morrison
has done for the life experience of American slaves.
One set of African voices remembering the Leopold era,
however, is now available in a
form that it was not when I wrote the book. The quotation on
page 166 comes from an
article based on interviews, in the 1950s, with dozens of
Africans who survived the rubber
terror of half a century earlier. A Belgian missionary, Edmond
Boelaert, conducted these
conversations and then translated them along with another

missionary, Gustaaf Hulstaert,
and a Congolese colleague, Charles Lonkama. The two priests
were anticolonialists of a
sort, frequently in trouble with Catholic authorities. The Centre
Aequatoria, at a mission
station near Mbandaka, Congo, and its Belgian supporters have
now placed on the
Internet the full French text of these interviews, which run to
some two hundred pages.
All are, unfortunately, far too short to give us a full picture of
someone's life, but they still
offer rare firsthand African testimony.
For the book I wrote after King Leopold's Ghost, I spent several
years living, intellectually,
in the company of the Protestant evangelicals who played a
crucial role in the British
antislavery movement of 1787–1833. That experience made me
think I had understated,
in this book, the importance of the evangelical tradition in the
appeal of Congo reform to
the British public. A recent study by Kevin Grant, A Civilised
Savagery: Britain and the
New Slaveries in Africa, 1884–1926, reinforced this impression.
Grant shows how virtually
everyone who has written about Morel, myself included, has
overlooked the way Baptist
missionaries had already started to draw large crowds in
Scotland to "magic lantern" slide
shows about Congo atrocities two months before Morel founded
the Congo Reform
Association. He has also unearthed some disturbing material
about how Morel's single-
minded focus on his Congo campaign led him to whitewash the
plight of forced laborers in
Portuguese Africa who harvested the cocoa beans used by his

friend and benefactor, the
chocolate manufacturer William Cadbury. By contrast, Grant's
account of Morel during the
First World War makes one admire the man's courage even
more. Not only did he suffer
prison for his antiwar beliefs while his former missionary allies
got shamelessly swept up
by patriotic fever, but he was almost alone, during the war and
after, in advocating for
Africans' rights to their own land.
Thanks to letters from sharp-eyed readers, for this new edition
of King Leopold's Ghost
I've corrected some misspellings and other minor errors from
earlier printings. But one
place where there has been no need for any changes is the
account of the death toll in
chapter 15. Acknowledging this huge loss has always been the
hardest thing for Leopold's
defenders to face. Without accurate census data, assessing it
will always be a matter of
estimates. But both at the time and today, the most
knowledgeable estimates are high. In
addition to those that I cited, I could have mentioned many
more.8 Isidore Ndaywel è
Nziem, a Congolese scholar whose Histoire général du Congo
was published the same
year as King Leopold's Ghost, put the death toll at roughly
thirteen million,9 a higher
figure than I've suggested. Defensive Belgians sometimes point

out that there were
catastrophic death rates in other colonies in central Africa, and
an even larger toll among
American Indians. Both points are true. But this does not negate
or excuse the enormous
human loss in Leopold's Congo.
This book first appeared just after the longtime dictator Mobutu
fell from power. During
his time in office, most public services had ceased and
government had become, as it was
under Leopold, merely a mechanism for the leader and his
entourage to enrich
themselves. In health, life expectancy, schooling, and income
the Congolese people were
far worse off at the end of Mobutu's reign than they had been at
the end of eighty years
of colonialism in 1960. His soldiers had supported themselves
by collecting tolls at
roadblocks, generals had sold off jet fighters for profit, and
during the Tokyo real estate
boom, the Congo's ambassador to Japan sold the embassy and
apparently pocketed the
money.10 Surely, it seemed, any new regime would be better
than this.
At the time Mobutu's rule ended, in 1997, many hoped his long-
suffering people would at
last be able to reap some of the benefits of the country's natural
riches. But this was not
to be. News from the misnamed Democratic Republic of Congo
in the past few years has
been so grim as to make one want to turn the page or change the
TV channel in despair:
mass rapes by HIV-infected troops, schools and hospitals
looted, ten-year-old soldiers

brandishing AK-47s. For years after Mobutu's fall, the country
was ravaged by a
bewilderingly complicated civil war. Across the land have
ranged troops from seven
nearby African countries, the ruthless militias of local warlords,
and rebel groups from
other nations using this vast and lawless territory as a refuge,
such as the Hutu militia
responsible for the 1994 genocide in Rwanda. The Rwandan
army later pursued these
soldiers into the Congo, carried out something of a counter-
genocide of their own, and
then helped themselves to more than $250 million worth of the
Congo's natural resources
in one two-year stretch alone. Various of these forces, plus the
Congo's nominal
government and several opposition groups, have been connected
or riven by a constantly
changing array of alliances.
Multinational corporations have also been in on the take. What
protects their interests
now is no longer the old Force Publique but rather under-the-
table agreements with the
different national armies and Congolese factions. Just as ivory
and rubber drove the
search for profits in the old days, today these companies have
been eagerly extracting
Congo's diamonds, gold, timber, copper, cobalt, and
columbium-tantalum, or coltan,
which is used in computer chips and cell phones. Coltan has at
times rivaled gold in price
per ounce; eastern Congo has more than half the world's supply.
The fighting has been
over riches, not ideology; the worst combat sometimes shifted
location with the rise and

fall of relative commodity prices.
By 2004, human rights organizations reported, the war's death
toll was almost four
million, and more than two million people were refugees. Few
of the dead have been
soldiers. Most are ordinary men, women, and children, caught in
crossfire, unlucky
enough to have stumbled onto land mines, or forced to flee their
homes for forests or for
crowded refugee camps that turn into fields of mud in the rainy
season. Just as in
Leopold's time, by far the greatest toll has been taken by the
diseases that ravage a
traumatized, half-starving population, some of it in flight. As I
write this in 2005, the toll
has been the largest concentration of war-related fatalities
anywhere on earth since the
end of World War II. Despite periodic truces and power-sharing
agreements, the deaths
seem likely to continue.
The rebel militias, the Congo's African neighbors, and many of
their corporate allies have
little interest in ending the country's Balkanization. They prefer
a cash-in-suitcases
economy to a taxed and regulated one that would give all
citizens a real share of the
profits from natural resources. For the Congo, the combination
of being a great mineral

treasure house and in effect having no working government has
been catastrophic. When
there is no money in the public till, armies become self-
financing networks of miners and
smugglers. When there are few schools or jobs, they can easily
recruit children. When the
millions of small arms circulating in Africa can be bought at
street bazaars or from
policemen who've received no pay, there are guns for all.
Tragically, no powerful outside constituency, like Morel's
Congo reformers, exists to lobby
for measures that would help. Nor, to be sure, is it clear what
the most effective help
would be. But some things should still be tried. One would be to
stop pouring arms into
Africa so thoughtlessly. During the 1990s alone, the United
States gave more than $200
million worth of equipment and training to African armies,
including six of the seven that
have had troops in the Congo's civil war. Another step forward
would be to remove
incentives for looting by criminalizing the illegal trade in
minerals. More than sixty
countries, including the United States, have signed a somewhat
toothless agreement to
stop trading in "conflict diamonds." But if conflict diamonds
can be outlawed, why not
conflict gold and conflict coltan? Such pacts would be difficult
to enforce, but so, for many
years, was the ultimately successful ban on the Atlantic slave
trade. A sufficiently large
and empowered United Nations peacekeeping force could also
make a huge difference.
We should have no illusions that such a force would solve the

Congo's vast problem of
having no functioning central government. International
intervention in the country is like
asking security guards to patrol a bank in mid-robbery. The
guards may end up robbing
or running the bank, whether at the level of a sergeant
smuggling diamonds or a major
power contributing troops while demanding favors for its
mining companies. But the
alternatives are worse. A strong intervention force could
ultimately save lives, millions of
them. And finally, for all of Africa, ending the subsidies and
trade barriers that make it so
difficult for farmers in the world's South to sell crops to Europe
or North America would be
one step in leveling an international economic playing field that
remains tilted against the
poor.
One reason I wrote this book was to show how profoundly
European colonialism has
shaped the world we live in. And, remembering how the United
States and Europe have
protected their investments by supporting disastrous African
dictators like Mobutu, we
must speak of neocolonialism as well. But I want to end on a
note of caution. Despite the
thievery of Leopold and his successors, it is wrong to blame the
problems of today's Africa
entirely on colonialism. Much of history consists of peoples
conquering or colonizing each
other. Yet, from Ireland to South Korea, countries that were
once ruthlessly colonized
have nonetheless managed to build reasonably just and
democratic societies.

The reasons most of Africa has not done so go far beyond the
colonial heritage. One
factor is the abysmal position of women and all of the violence,
repression, and prejudices
that go with that. Another is the deep-seated cultural tolerance
and even hero-worship of
strongmen like Mobutu, for whom politics is largly a matter of
enriching themselves and
their extended clan or ethnic group. Finally, perhaps above all,
is the way the long history
of indigenous slavery is still deeply and disastrously woven into
the African social fabric.
These same handicaps exist elsewhere. Discrimination against
women retards social and
economic progress in many countries. Many societies, from the
Balkans to Afghanistan,
have had trouble building nation-states when power-hungry
demagogues inflame ethnic
chauvinism. And Africa is not alone in its heritage of slavery:
Chekhov, knowing the
weight of his own country's history of serfdom, spoke of how
Russians must squeeze the
slave out of themselves, drop by drop. Russia's continuing
troubles show how long and
hard a task this is.
Even without the problems of being colonized, the birth of a
viable, truly democratic civil
society is usually a slow and difficult business. For western
Europe to move from the Holy
Roman Empire and the panoply of duchies and principalities

and mini-kingdoms to its
current patchwork of nations took centuries of bloodshed,
including the deadly Thirty
Years' War, whose anarchic multisidedness and array of
plundering outsiders remind one
of the Congo today. Africa cannot afford those centuries. Its
path will not be an easy one,
and nowhere will it be harder than in the Congo.
September 2005
Notes
1. coalition of these groups: Union Royale Belge pour les Pays
d'Outre-Mer.
2. "you were mistaken": Congorudi, Oct. 2001.
3. "the great king": Bulletin du Cercle Royal Naumurois des
Anciens d'Afrique, no. 4,
1998.
4. the Guardian: 13 May 1999.
5. a journalist noted: Colette Braeckman, Les Nouveaux
Prédateurs: Politique des
puissances en Afrique centrale (Paris: Fayard, 2003), p. 35.
6. "book by an American": Guardian, 13 May 1999.
7. the Royal Museum in the future: For more detail on the
evasions and denial of the
2005 exhibit, see my article "In the Heart of Darkness," in the
New York Review of Books,
22 Sept. 2005.

8. mentioned many more: For example, R. P. Van Wing, Études
Bakongo: Histoire et
Sociologie (Brussels: Goemaere, 1920), p. 115; or Léon de St.
Moulin, "What Is Known of
the Demographic History of Zaire Since 1885?" in Bruce Fetter,
ed., Demography from
Scanty Evidence: Central Africa in the Colonial Era (Boulder,
Colo.: Lynne Rienner, 1990),
p. 303.
9. roughly thirteen million: Isidore Ndaywel è Nziem, Histoire
générale du Congo: De
l'héritage ancien à la République Démocratique (Paris: Duculot,
1998), p. 344. Professor
Ndaywel è Nziem informs me that further research for the next
edition of his book has
made him lower his estimate to ten million. But that would still
imply a 50 percent loss of
population.
10. pocketed the money: See Michela Wrong, In the Footsteps
of Mr. Kurtz: Living on the
Brink of Disaster in Mobutu's Congo (New York:
HarperCollins, 2001), for this and much
more.
About the Author
Adam Hochschild was born in New York City in 1942. His first
book, Half the Way Home: A
Memoir of Father and Son, was published in 1986. It was

followed by The Mirror at
Midnight: A South African Journey (1990) and The Unquiet
Ghost: Russians Remember
Stalin (1994). Finding the Trapdoor: Essays, Portraits, Travels
won the 1998 PEN/
Spielvogel-Diamonstein Award for the Art of the Essay.
Hochschild's books have been
translated into five languages and have won prizes from the
Overseas Press Club of
America, the World Affairs Council, the Eugene V. Debs
Foundation, and the Society of
American Travel Writers. Three of his books—including King
Leopold's Ghost—have been
named Notable Books of the Year by The New York Times
Book Review and Library
Journal. King Leopold's Ghost was also awarded the 1998
California Book Awards gold
medal for nonfiction.
Hochschild has also written for The New Yorker, Harper's
Magazine, The New York Review
of Books, The New York Times Magazine, Mother Jones (which
he co-founded), The
Nation, and many other magazines and newspapers. A former
commentator on National
Public Radio's "All Things Considered," he teaches writing at
the Graduate School of
Journalism at the University of California at Berkeley. In 1997-
98 he was a Fulbright
Lecturer in India. He lives in San Francisco with his wife,
Arlie, the sociologist and author.
They have two sons.
A Conversation with Adam Hochschild
Q) What result of your research for this book surprised you the

most?
A) In Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness, the villain, Mr.
Kurtz, has topped his fenceposts
with severed African heads. Critics most frequently talk about
that book in terms of the
evil in us all, rather than the evil of a specific time and place. I
found three different
officers in King Leopold’s private army who collected African
heads and whose paths
crossed Conrad’s. Furthermore, the swashbuckling Captain Léon
Rom—like Kurtz—wrote
for publication, painted, and was an amateur scientist. How
could Conrad’s many
biographers have missed all this?
eNumber=681101
Q) If so little had been written about the congo, how were you
able to
reconstruct what happened there?
A) Scholars have, in fact, published quite a lot on this period,
but usually in obscure
places. More important, visitors and officials in the Congo seem
to have spent every
evening writing letters home. King Leopold himself wrote
thousands of letters and
memoranda that reveal his lust for colonies and profits.
Missionaries and other
eyewitnesses kept diaries. A few brave whistle blowers in the

Congo administration
smuggled key documents to Europe. Conrad kept a journal.
Several officers of Leopold’s
private army bragged in their notebooks about how many
Africans their men killed each
day. Old newspapers were also very revealing. Sadly, there are
virtually no documents
from this period left in the Congo itself.
Q) What links do you see between the Congo's history and the
troubles there
today?
A) Even before the Europeans arrived, central Africa’s
indigenous societies were not
democratic. And then the experience of several hundred years of
little but plunder — first
by slavers, then by King Leopold’s murderous forced-labor
system, then by the more
orderly Belgian administration—was a terrible foundation for
democracy. On top of all
that, since 1965 the dictator Mobutu Sese Seko, who took power
with strong U.S.
support, robbed his own country even more thoroughly than
Leopold had.
Q) How do you decide what subjects to write about?
A) What most of my works, long and short, have in common is
an enduring fascination
with good and evil, and with the vagaries of fate, social
pressure and political systems,
and with the mysteries of character that make a person behave
one way or the other.
Why did a provincial Belgian book-keeper become a marauder
in the Congo? How did an

idealistic young Hungarian doctor become a feared secret police
chieftain in Siberia? Why,
on the other hand, did the son of a former governor general of
South Africa turn anti-
apartheid crusader? What made a neo-Nazi activist in America
become a human rights
crusader? And why did a rising young British shipping
executive leave his job to become
the greatest muckraker of his day? Every time I find such
people, I’m drawn to them.
Measuring Human Rights: Principle, Practice, and Policy
Author(s): Todd Landman
Source: Human Rights Quarterly, Vol. 26, No. 4 (Nov., 2004),
pp. 906-931
Published by: The Johns Hopkins University Press
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HUMAN RIGHTS QUARTERLY
Measuring Human Rights:
Principle, Practice, and Policy
Todd Land man*
ABSTRACT
This paper demonstrates why human rights measurement is
important, how
human rights have been measured to date, and how such
measures can be
improved in the future. Through focusing primarily but not

exclusively on
the measurement of civil and political rights, the paper argues
that human
rights can be measured in principle, in practice, and as
outcomes of
government policy. Such measures include the coding of formal
legal
documents, events-based, standards-based, and survey-based
data, as well
as aggregate indicators that serve as indirect measures of rights
protection.
The paper concludes by stressing the need for continued
provision of high
quality information at the lowest level of aggregation, sharing
information
and developing an ethos of replication, and long term
investment in data
collection efforts.
I. INTRODUCTION
Human rights scholars, practitioners, and activists use a variety
of measures
and indicators to describe the advances and setbacks in the
promotion and
*

Todd Landman is Senior Lecturer in the Department of
Government and Co-Director, Human
Rights Centre, University of Essex. He is author of Protecting
Human Rights: A Global
Comparative Study (Georgetown University Press,
forthcoming), Issues and Methods in
Comparative Politics (Routledge 2000, 2003), Governing Latin
America (Polity Press, 2003
with Joe Foweraker & Neil Harvey), and Citizenship Rights and
Social Movements: A
Comparative and Statistical Analysis (Oxford University Press
1997, with Joe Foweraker).
The author would like to acknowledge the support of the
European Commission (Eurostat
Contract No. 200221200005) in funding the project on
measuring democracy, good
governance, and human rights from which this article emerged.
He also wishes to thank Julia
H?usermann, Sebastian Dellepiane, Matthew Sudders, Olivia
Wills, and Patrick Ball for their
discussions.
Human Rights Quarterly 26 (2004) 906-931 ? 2004 by The
Johns Hopkins University Press
13:48:57 PM

2004 Measuring Human Rights 907
protection of human rights, to provide explanations for their
overall global
variation, and to find solutions to guarantee their improved
protection in the
future. The international community has established an ideal
standard of
human rights protection formally laid out in the international
law of human
rights, which extends from the anti-slavery measures in the
nineteenth
century to the most recent statute establishing the International
Criminal
Court. Between ninety-five and 191 countries have become
signatories to
the main legal instruments comprising the international human
rights
regime, where both the breadth and depth of formal
participation has
expanded since the 1948 UN Declaration.1 In addition,
countries have
become parties to various regionally based systems for the

promotion and
protection of human rights, including the European, Inter-
American, and
African systems. Global evidence on human rights violations,
however,
suggests that "there are more countries in the world today where
fundamen
tal rights and civil liberties are regularly violated than countries
where they
are effectively protected."2
Thus, despite the growth and proliferation of legal instruments
for the
protection of human rights, there is a continuing disparity
between official
proclamation and actual implementation of human rights
protection. Since
the 1980s, this disparity has been a fruitful area for systematic
comparative
research.3 Such empirical research includes studies that
examine the global
variation in human rights protection4; the relationship between
human
1. Ann F. Bayefsky, The UN Human Rights Treaty System:
Universality at the Crossroads, York
University Human Rights Project (2001 ), available at
www.yorku.ca/hrights; Todd Landman,

Measuring the International Human Rights Regime, paper
presented at the 97th Annual
Meeting of the American Political Science Association, San
Francisco (2001 ) (on file with
author); Todd Landman, Measuring Human Rights and the
Impact of Human Rights
Policy, paper presented at the EU Conference on Human Rights
Impact Assessment,
Brussels (2001); Todd Landman, The Economic Requirements
of Democracy, in
Encyclopedia of Democratic Thought (Paul Barry Clarke & Joe
Foweraker eds., 2001 ); Todd
Landman, The Evolution of the International Human Rights
Regime: Political and
Economic Determinants, paper presented at the 98th Annual
Meeting of the American
Political Science Association, Boston, 29 Aug.-1 Sept. 2002.
2. A.H. Robertson & J.G. Merrills, Human Rights in The World:
An Introduction to the Study of
the International Protection of Human Rights 2 (4th ed. 1996).
3. Todd Landman, Comparative Politics and Human Rights, 24
Hum. Rts. Q. 890 (2002).
4. Neil J. Mitchell & James M. McCormick, Economic and
Political Explanations of Human
Rights Violations, 40 World Politics 476 (1988); Conway
Henderson, Conditions
Affecting the Use of Political Repression, 35 J. Conf. Res. 120
(1991); Conway

Henderson, Population Pressures and Political Repression, 74
Soc. Sei. Q. 322 (1993);
Stephen C Poe & C Neil T?te, Repression of Human Rights to
Personal Integrity in the
1980s: A Global Analysis, 88 Am. Pol. Sci. Rev. 853 (1994);
Christian Davenport, Multi
dimensional Threat Perception and State Repression, 39 Am. J.
Pol. Sci. 683 (1995); Scott
S. Gartner & Patrick M. Regan, Threat and Repression, 33 J.
Peace Res. 273 (1996);
Stephen C. Poe et al., Repression of the Human Right to
Personal Integrity Revisited: A
Global Cross-National Study Covering the Years 1976-1993, 43
Int'l Stud. Q. 291
(1999).
13:48:57 PM
908 HUMAN RIGHTS QUARTERLY Vol. 26
rights treaty ratification and human rights protection5; refugee
policy and
human rights6; economic assistance and human rights7; military
assistance

and human rights8; democracy and human rights9; and direct
foreign
investment and human rights.10 Moreover, the attention to the
persistent
difference between "rights in principle" and "rights in
practice"11 has
motivated academics, policy makers, nongovernmental
organizations
(NGOs), and human rights practitioners to promote public and
international
policies that bring actual human rights practices more in line
with the
expectations laid out in the international human rights regime.
In light of these developments in the formal and legal
enumeration of
rights and global variation of their protection, this article
demonstrates the
continued need for and use of meaningful, valid, time-series
measures of
human rights protection. Part one of the article argues that in
addition to the
inherent value in monitoring and documenting human rights
violations,
human rights measurement is important for classifying different
types of
violation, mapping violations over space and time, and
conducting second

order analysis of violations. Part two examines the ethical,
political, and
methodological problems surrounding human rights
measurement and
5. Markku Suksi, Bringing in the People: A Comparison of
Constitutional Forms and Practices of the
Referendum (1993); Linda C Keith, The United Nations
International Covenant on Civil
and Political Rights: Does it Make a Difference in Human
Rights Behavior?, 36 J. Peace
Res. 95 (1999); Todd Landman, Protecting Human Rights: A
Global Study (2004);
Oona Hathaway, Do Treaties Make a Difference? Human Rights
Treaties and the
Problem of Compliance, 111 Yale L. J. 1935 (2002).
6. Mark Gibney & Michael Stohl, Human Rights and US
Refugee Policy, in Open Borders?
Closed Societies?: The Ethical and Political Issues (Mark
Gibney ed., 1988); Mark Gibney
et al., USA Refugee Policy: A Human Rights Analysis Update,
5 J. Ref. Stud. 37 (1992).
7. Michael Stohl et al., Human Rights and US Foreign
Assistance, 21 J. Peace Res. 215
(1984); Stephen C. Poe, Human Rights and Economic Aid
Allocation, 36 Am. J. Pol. Sci.

147 (1992); Stephen C. Poe & Rangsima Sirirangsi, Human
Rights and US Economic Aid
to Africa, 18 Int'l Interactions 1 (1993); Stephen C Poe &
Rangsima Sirirangsi, Human
Rights and Economic Aid During the Reagan Years, 75 Soc.
Sci. Q. 494 (1994); Patrick M.
Regan, US Economic Aid and Political Repression, 48 Pol. Res.
Q. 613 (1995).
8. William J. Dixon & Bruce E. Moon, Military Burden and
Basic Human Rights Needs, 30
J. Conf. Res. 660 (1986); Stephen C Poe, Human Rights and the
Allocation of US Military
Assistance, 28 J. Peace Res. 1 (1991 ); Stephen C Poe & James
Meernik, US Military Aid in
the 1980s: A Global Analysis, 32 J. Peace Res. 399 (1995).
9. Christian Davenport, Human Rights and the Democratic
Proposition, 43 J. Conf. Res. 92
(1999); Sabine C Zanger, A Global Analysis of the Effect of
Regime Changes on Life
Integrity Violations, 1977-1993, 37 J. Peace Res. 213 (2000).
10. William H. Meyer, Human Rights andMNCs: Theory vs.
Quantitative Evidence, 18 Hum.
Rts. Q. 368 (1996); William H. Meyer, Confirming, Infirming,
and Falsifying Theories of
Human Rights: Reflections on Smith, Bolyard, and Ippolito
Through the Lens of Lakatos,

21 Hum. Rts. Q. 220 (1999).
11. Joe Foweraker & Todd Landman, Citizenship Rights and
Social Movements: A Comparative and
Statistical Analysis (1997); see also Christian Davenport,
Constitutional Promises and
Repressive Reality, 58 J. Pol. 627 (1996).
13:48:57 PM
shows how some of these problems have been overcome. Part
three shows
how political and civil rights have been measured to date and
how
discussions of their measurement are also useful for measuring
economic,
social, and cultural rights. Part four summarizes the various
ways in which
human rights can and have been measured and discusses the
implications
of human rights measurement for the wider policy arena.
II. WHY MEASURE HUMAN RIGHTS?

Measuring human rights serves the following four functions: (1)
contextual
description, monitoring, and documentation of violations; (2)
classification
of different types of violations; (3) mapping and pattern
recognition of
violations over space and time; and (4) secondary analysis that
provides
explanations for violations and policy solutions for reducing
them in the
future. Contextual description provides the raw information
upon which
measures of human rights are based. Classification allows for
the differentia
tion of rights violations across their civil, political, economic,
social, and
cultural dimensions. Mapping provides time-series and spatial
information
on the broad patterns of violations within and across different
countries.
Finally, secondary analysis tests hypotheses about rights
violations, the
inferences from which can be fed into the policy making
process, whether
that involves sanctions and conditionalities imposed on rights-
violating

states, prioritizing domestic spending to improve rights
conditions, or
bringing about a change in institutions and practices. Thus, the
accumula
tion of information on human rights protection in the world and
the results
of systematic analysis can serve as the basis for the continued
development
of human rights policy, advocacy, and education.12 Moreover,
"to forswear
the use of available, although imperfect, data does not advance
scholar
ship,"13 nor does it allow for the kind of continued human
rights activism
that seeks to eliminate the worst forms of human behavior.
Despite the good intentions behind and valuable reasons for
measuring
human rights, important ethical, methodological, and political
problems
remain. Ethically, it can be dehumanizing to use statistics to
analyze
12. Barnett R. Rubin & Paula R. Newberg, Statistical Analysis
for Implementing Human
Rights Policy, in The Politics of Human Rights 268 (Paula R.
Newberg ed., 1980); Richard
P. Claude & Thomas B. Jabine, Exploring Human Rights Issues
with Statistics, in Human
Rights and Statistics: Getting the Record Straight 5-34 (Richard

P. Claude & Thomas B.
Jabine eds., 1992).
13. J.C Strouse & Richard P. Claude, Empirical Comparative
Rights Research: Some
Preliminary Tests of Development Hypotheses, in Comparative
Human Rights 52 (Richard P.
Claude ed., 1976).
13:48:57 PM
violations of human rights,14 and it is often difficult to judge
the relative
weight of one type of violation over another, thereby
committing some form
of moral relativism. Methodologically, raw numbers of
violations are
continuous without an upper limit, which can make them
intractable for
comparative purposes,15 while the level of available
information on viola
tions can vary.16 Politically, International Government
Organizations (IGOs)

and NGOs refuse to rank countries with regard to their human
rights
practices for fear of recrimination and loss of credibility.
Indeed, the United
Nations Development Programme (UNDP) came under strong
political
criticism for its 1991 Human Development Report, which used a
measure of
human rights that ranked all UN member states according to
categories
derived from the UN Declaration.17 The next section addresses
these various
concerns as it examines how to measure human rights.
III. HOW TO MEASURE HUMAN RIGHTS
Measuring human rights is based on several assumptions. First,
despite the
absence of strong philosophical foundations for the existence of
human
rights,18 the accumulation of international human rights law
provides ideal
standards for those rights that should be protected.19 Second,
violations
have been and continue to be committed by state and nonstate
actors.
Third, individuals and groups that suffer abuse of their rights
can provide

information and testimony, while human rights practitioners can
provide
standardized mechanisms for such reporting. Numerous
accounts of human
rights abuse have been provided to formal bodies, such as the
International
Military Tribunal in Nuremberg,20 the International Criminal
Tribunals for
14. Jabine & Claude, supra note 12.
15. Herbert Spirer, Violations of Human Rights?How Many?, 49
Am. J. Econ. & Soc. 199
(1990).
16. Kenneth A. Bollen, Political Rights and Political Liberties
in Nations: An Evaluation of
Rights Measures, 1950 to 1984, in Human Rights
and Statistics: Getting the Record Straight,
supra note 12, at 198.
17. R?ssel L. Barsh, Measuring Human Rights: Problems of
Methodology and Purpose, 15
Hum. Rts. Q. 87 (1993); Charles Humana, World Human Rights
Guide (1983; 1986; 1992).
18. Susan Mendus, Human Rights in Political Theory, 43 Pol.
Stud. (Special Issue) 10 (1995).
19. This is based on a tabulation of international human rights
instruments. Scott Davidson,
Human Rights 193-96 (1993); Maria Green, What We Talk

about When We Talk about
Indicators: Current Approaches to Human Rights Measurement,
23 Hum. Rts. Q. 1062,
1968-70 (2001 ) show that there are over sixty rights that ought
to be protected, including
civil, political, economic, social, cultural, and solidarity rights.
Despite these attempts to
enumerate human rights, there remains some doubt as to the full
content of many rights
and lack of clarity with regard to state obligation for their
protection. The author is
grateful to Julia H?usermann for this valuable insight.
20. Joseph E. P?rsico, Nuremberg: Infamy on Trial (1994).
13:48:57 PM
the Former Yugoslavia and Rwanda, and the more than twenty
truth and
reconciliation commissions (TRCs) in Africa and Latin
America,21 as well as
violation information that continues to be collected by
governmental,
intergovernmental, and nongovernmental organizations. Fourth,

patterns of
violations mean that human rights are "more or less" protected
in nation
states and that this "more or less" can be measured in some
fashion.
Taken together, these assumptions suggest that human rights
can be
measured in principle (i.e. as they are laid out in national and
international
legal documents), in practice (i.e. as they are enjoyed by
individuals and
groups in nation states), and as outcomes of government policy
that has a
direct bearing on human rights protection.22 As will be shown
below,
measurement of human rights can take the form of coding
country
participation in regional and international human rights
regimes, coding
national constitutions according to their rights provisions,
qualitative report
ing of rights violations, survey data on perceptions of rights
conditions,
quantitative summaries of rights violations, abstract scales of
rights protec
tion based on normative standards, and individual and aggregate
measures
that map the outcomes of government policies that have

consequences for
the enjoyment of rights.
A. Rights in Principle
International and domestic law enshrines norms and principles
of human
rights, which can be coded using protocols that reward a
country for having
certain rights provisions in place. Van Maarseveen and Van Der
Tang set an
important precedent by coding constitutions for 157 countries
across a
multitude of institutional and rights dimensions for the period 1
788-1975.23
Their study compares the degree to which national constitutions
contain
those rights mentioned in the UN Declaration for Human Rights
by
examining their frequency distributions across different
historical epochs
before and after 1948. Figure 1 shows the results of their
comparisons for
civil and political rights, while Figure 2 shows them for
economic and social
rights. Their study is broadly descriptive in nature, but its data
allow for
21. Priscilla B. Hayner, Fifteen Truth Commissions?1974 to
1994: A Comparative Study, 16
Hum. Rts. Q. 597 (1994); Priscilla B. Hayner, Unspeakable
Truths: Facing the Challenge of

Truth Commissions (2002).
22. International human rights lawyers would argue that the
difference between principle
and practice is the same as the difference between de jure
protection of human rights
and de facto realization.
23. Henc Van Maarseveen & Ger Van Der Tang, Written
Constitutions: A Computerized Comparative
Study ch. 6 (1978).
13:48:57 PM
FIGURE 1
National Constitutional Provisions for Rights in Principle: Civil
and Political Rights
120
>$4<'<:s&'*&' v
<&* v*
^
y
Types of Rights

1788-1948 D 1949-1957 1958-1966 1967-1975
5ee Henc Van Maarseveen & G er Van Der Tang, Written
Constitutions: A Computerized Comparative
Study 189-211 (1978).
FIGURE 2
National Constitutional Provisions for Rights in Principle:
Economic and Social Rights
Types of Rights
11788-1948 D 1949-1957 I 1958-1966 I 1967-1975
Van Maarseveen & Van Der Tang, at 189-211.
13:48:57 PM
global patterns and processes of change in the formal protection
of rights to
be mapped, while secondary and more advanced statistical
analysis could
be conducted.
Using an "institutional procedural index/' Foweraker and

Landman
code rights in principle for Brazil, Chile, Mexico, and Spain
using the
various national constitutions and constitutional amendments
during the
years of political liberalization and democratic transitions.24 In
both of these
studies, the authors are concerned with the formally declared
commitment
to rights protection as it appears in national constitutions. More
recently, Poe
and Keith have coded national constitutions to measure their
ability to
suspend rights protection during states of emergency.25 At the
global level,
Keith, Landman, and Hathaway code the regional and
international human
rights regimes by scoring countries for signing and ratifying
major human
rights instruments.26 Rather than code individual rights
provisions, these
authors code the degree to which countries are parties to human
rights
treaties over time. Figure 4 shows the number of countries that
have ratified

the main international human rights instruments for the period
1976-2000.27
Coding rights in principle, either at the national or international
level is
24. Foweraker & Landman, supra note 11. See also Figure 3.
25. Steven C. Poe & Linda C Keith, Personal Integrity Abuse
During Domestic Crises Paper
Prepared for the 98th Annual Meeting of the American Political
Science Association,
Boston (2002) (on file with author).
26. Keith, supra note 5; Landman, Protecting Human Rights,
supra note 5; Hathaway, supra
note 5.
27. These instruments include the International Covenant on
Civil and Political Rights,
adopted 19 Dec. 1966, G.A. Res. 2200 (XXI), U.N. GAOR, 21st
Sess., Supp. No. 16,
U.N. Doc. A/6316 (1966), 999 U.N.T.S. 171 (entered into force
23 Mar. 1976) (ICCPR);
International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural
Rights, adopted 19 Dec. 1966,
G.A. Res. 2200 (XXI), U.N. GAOR, 21st Sess., Supp. No. 16,
U.N. Doc. A/6316 (1966),
993 U.N.T.S. 3 (entered into force 3 Jan. 1976) (ICESCR); the
First and Second Optional
Protocols to the ICCPR, Optional Protocol to the International
Covenant on Civil and
Political Rights, adopted 16 Dec. 1966, G.A. Res. 2200A (XXI),

U.N. GAOR, 21st Sess.,
Supp. No. 16, U.N. Doc. A/6316 (1966), 999 U.N.T.S. 171
(entered into force 23 Mar.
1976), reprinted in 6 I.L.M. 383 (1967); International
Convention on the Elimination of
All Forms of Racial Discrimination, adopted 21 Dec. 1965, 660
U.N.T.S. 195 (entered
into force 4 Jan. 1969), reprinted in 5 I.L.M. 352 (1966)
(CERD); Convention on the
Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination Against Women,
adopted 18 Dec. 1979, G.A.
Res. 34/180, U.N. GAOR, 34th Sess., Supp. No. 46, U.N. Doc.
A/34/46 (1980) (entered
into force 3 Sept. 1981), 1249 U.N.T.S. 13, reprinted in 19
I.L.M. 33 (1980) (CEDAW);
Convention Against Torture and Other Cruel, Inhuman or
Degrading Treatment or
Punishment, adopted 10 Dec. 1984, G.A. Res. 39/46, U.N.
GAOR, 39th Sess., Supp. No.
51, U.N. Doc. A/39/51 (1985) (entered into force 26 June 1987),
reprinted in 23 I.L.M.
1027 (1984), substantive changes noted in 24 I.L.M. 535 (1985)
(CAT); and the
Convention on the Rights of the Child, adopted 20 Nov. 1989,
G.A. Res. 44/25, U.N.
GAOR, 44th Sess., Supp. No. 49, U.N. Doc. A/44/49 (1989)

(entered into force 2 Sept.
1990), reprinted in 28 I.L.M. 1448 (1989) (CRC). See also
Thomas Buercenthal, Interna
tional Human Rights in a Nutshell (1995).
13:48:57 PM
FIGURE 3
Rights in Principle in Brazil (1964-1990), Chile (1973-1990),
Mexico (1963-1990),
and Spain (1958-1983)
1.2
0.8
0.6
0.4
0.2
0
-0.2
- Brazil
? - Chile

-Mexico
-Spain
.-.J
xA^b^
Year
Joe Foweraker & Todd Landman, Citizenship Rights and Social
Movements: A Comparative and Statistical
Analysis (1997).
important because it translates legal qualitative information into
quantitative
information that can be used to track the formal commitment of
countries to
rights protection against which their actual practices can be
compared.
Foweraker and Landman use regression techniques to gauge the
relative gap
between rights in principle and rights in practice in Brazil,
Chile, Mexico,
and Spain.28 Their analysis demonstrates that during the
process of political
liberalization, authoritarian states can deny rights that they
proclaim are
protected (a negative gap), protect rights that they proclaim are
protected (a
zero gap), or protect rights that they proclaim are not protected

(a positive
gap).29 Poe and Keith use their state of emergency variable to
examine the
28. See Foweraker & Landman, supra note 11, at 62-65; see also
R. Duvall & M. Shamir,
Indicators from Errors: Cross-National, Time Serial Measures of
the Repressive Disposi
tion of Government, in Indicator Systems for Political,
Economic, and Social Analysis 162-63
(Charles Lewis Taylor ed., 1980); Zehra F. Arat, Democracy
and Human Rights in Developing
Countries (1991).
29. Interestingly, such a gap merely identifies the degree to
which a regime complies with its
formal commitments and nothing about the regime type itself.
For example, "a
13:48:57 PM
FIGURE 4
Mapping Treaty Ratification
1976 1977 1978 1979 19801981 19821983 1984 198519861987

1988 1989 1990 1991 199219931994 1995 19961997 1998 1999
2000
Year
ICESCR-ICCPR.OPT1 .OPT2-CERD-CEDAW.CAT -CRC
Landman 2001.
relationship between the law and practice of human rights while
controlling
for the independent effects of democracy, wealth, and
warfare.30 Using the
notions of principle and practice for global analysis shows that
regimes
frequently make formal commitments to human rights treaties
but continue
to violate human rights. This difference is captured by weak
positive or even
negative correlation and regression coefficients between
ratification and
rights variables.31 Carrying out such analyses, however,
requires measure
ment of rights in practice to which the discussion now turns.
totalitarian polity with no rights protection and much
repression, and a democratic polity
with full rights protection and complete liberty may both have a
zero GAP." See

Foweraker & Landman, supra note 11, at 63. Zanger tests the
relationship between regime
type and human rights protection and finds that even the first
year of a democratic
transition reduces the degree to which personal integrity rights
are violated. See Zanger,
supra note 9.
30. Poe & Keith, supra note 25.
31. Keith, supra note 5; Landman, Protecting Human Rights,
supra note 5; Hathaway, supra
note 5; see also Stephen D. Krasner, Sovereignty: Organized
Hypocrisy 122 (1999).
13:48:57 PM
B. Rights in Practice
Rights in practice are those rights actually enjoyed and
exercised by groups
and individuals regardless of the formal commitment made by a
govern
ment. While there ought to be a correspondence between formal
rights
commitments found in national constitutions and international
human rights

instruments and those enjoyed on the ground, it is often the case
that
individuals and groups do not enjoy the full protection of their
rights (a
negative gap in the terminology used above). Ideally, there
ought to be in
place a legal appeals procedure, mechanisms for seeking
domestic and
international remedies, and a subsequent correction in national
practices to
uphold the rights to which regimes have made formal
commitments.32 In the
absence of such systems or in the face of weak systems, the role
of many
human rights practitioners is to provide meaningful and
accurate informa
tion on the degree to which human rights are being violated.
Indeed, greater
concerns over humans rights since World War II has led to an
explosion in
the number of domestic and international human rights NGOs
collecting
information on violations.33 Such NGOs have been given
greater status in
international governmental organizations, and their activities
include setting

standards, providing information, lobbying, and giving direct
assistance to
those suffering abuse of their rights.34
The increase in the salience of human rights as an issue
combined with
organizations dedicated to documenting human rights violations
means that
32. There is a certain functionalist logic at work here, which
suggests that a gap between
principle and practice is somehow acted upon and the national
system responds
to re
equilibrate the relationship between citizens and the state.
Interestingly, human rights
scholars have argued that social mobilization at the national
level and activities carried
out by actors embedded in so-called "transnational advocacy
networks"
are the forces
for such re-equilibration. 5ee Foweraker & Landman, supra note
11 ; Joe Foweraker & Todd
Landman, Individual Rights and Social Movements: A
Comparative and Statistical
Inquiry, 29 Brit. J. Pol. Sci. 291 (1999); Thomas Risse
et al., The Power of Human Rights:
International Norms and Domestic Change (1999); Darren

Hawkins, International Human
Rights and Authoritarian Rule in Chile (2002).
33. While it is nearly impossible to count the number of
domestic human rights NGOs
around the world, it is estimated that there are about 250 such
organizations active
across borders. See Union of International Associations,
available afwww.uia.org; Jackie
Smith et al., Globalizing Human Rights: The Work of
Transnational Human Rights NGOs
in the 1990s, 20 Hum. Rts Q. 379 (1998).
34. In addition to Amnesty International and Human Rights
Watch, the International
Federation of Human Rights, available at www.fidh.org, and the
World Organisation
Against Torture, available aiwww.omct.org, have developed
systems for monitoring and
tabulating human abuses against individuals and human rights
defenders
as well as
making targeted appeals on behalf of victims of human rights
abuses. 5ee
David Forsythe,
Human Rights in International Relations 163-90 (2000); Claude
E. Welch, Jr., NGOs and

Human Rights: Promise and Performance 1-6 (2001).
13:48:57 PM
there is greater availability of comprehensive information on
actual prac
tices of states and the conditions under which individuals live.
But this
information necessarily will be lumpy and incomplete because
reporting of
human rights violations is fraught with difficulties, including
fear within
victims, power of the offenders, comprehensive evidence, and
quality of
communications technology, among others. In recognizing this
problem,
Bollen has argued that there are six levels of information on
human rights
violations.35 The most ideal level is that of all characteristics
(either reported
or unreported), followed by recorded violations, known and
accessible
violations, locally reported violations (nation-state),
internationally reported

violations, and the most biased coverage of violations, which
may include
those reported in US sources.
Work in this area seeks to obtain lower levels of information in
much
greater detail. For example, the Torture Reporting Handbook/6
and Report
ing Killings as Human Rights Violations,37 are manuals that
define specific
rights, outline the legal protections against their violation, and
provide ways
in which testimony and evidence from victims can be
collected.38 The
Human Rights Information and Documentation System
(HURIDOCS),
founded in 1982, provides standards for human rights violations
reporting,
and now represents a vast network of human rights groups.39
While such
increased information at all levels is helpful for systematic
human rights
research, there remains a tradeoff or tension between micro
levels of
information gathering and the ability to make systematic
comparative
inferences about human rights. In order for equivalent measures

to "travel"
for comparative analysis, there will necessarily be some loss of
information,
while the comparability of measures allows for stronger
generalizations
about human rights violations to be drawn.40
These issues about levels of information and the
commensurability for
35. Bollen, supra note 16, at 198; see also Figure 5.
36. Camille Giffard, Torture Reporting Handbook (2002),
available at www.essex.ac.uk/
torturehandbook.
37. Kate Thompson & Camille Giffard, Reporting Killings as
Human Rights Violations (2002).
38. Both of these manuals are published by the Human Rights
Centre at the University of
Essex.
39. For up to date information on the activities of and groups
involved with HURIDOCS, see
available aiwww.huridocs.org; Judith Dueck, HURIDOCS
Standard Formats as a Tool in
the Documentation of Human Rights Violations, in Human
Rights and Statistics: Getting the
Record Straight, supra note 12, at 127.
40. For a treatment of this trade-off between levels of

abstraction and the scope of countries
under comparison, see Todd Landman, Issues and Methods in
Comparative Politics: An
Introduction (2000); Todd Landman, Comparative Politics and
Human Rights, 25 Hum.
Rts. Q. (2002); Todd Landman, Issues and Methods in
Comparative Politics: An Introduction
(2d ed. 2003).
13:48:57 PM
FIGURE 5
Bollen's Levels of Human Rights Information and Reporting
All characteristics (recorded and unrecorded)
Recorded
Accessible
Locally reported
Internationally reported

US Reported
BIASED
See Kenneth A. Bollen, Political Rights and Political Liberties
in Nations: An Evaluation of
Rights Measures, 1950 to 1984, in Human Rights and Statistics:
Getting the Record Straight 198
(1992).
comparative analysis delineate the three types of data available
for measur
ing human rights in practice: (1) events-based, (2) standards-
based, and (3)
survey-based. Events-based data chart the reported acts of
violation com
mitted against groups and individuals. Events-based data answer
the
important questions of what happened, when it happened, and
who was
involved, and then report descriptive and numerical summaries
of the
events. Counting such events and violations involves
identifying the various
acts of commission and omission that constitute or lead to
human rights
violations, such as extra-judicial killings, arbitrary arrest, or
torture. Such

data tend to be disaggregated to the level of the violation itself,
which may
have related data units such as the perpetrator, the victim, and
the witness.41
Standards-based data establish how often and to what degree
violations
occur, and then translate such judgements into quantitative
scales that are
designed to achieve commensurability. Such measures are thus
one level
removed from event counting and violation reporting, and
merely apply an
ordinal scale to qualitative information. Finally, survey-based
data use
random samples of country populations to ask a series of
standard questions
41. Making the Case: Investigating Large Scale Human Rights
Violations Using Information Systems
and Data Analysis (Patrick Ball et al. eds., 2000).
13:48:57 PM

on the perception of rights protection. Such measures track
individual level
perceptions or rights violations.42
These different types of data map overall human rights practices
within
a country in different ways. The HURIDOCS project, handbooks
such as
those on torture43 and unlawful killings,44 and the work of
nationally based
human rights commissions collect events-based data, which can
provide
time-series and continuous indicators on human rights
violations. Standards
based scales such as the "political terror scale/45 the "index of
political
freedom/'46 the torture scale,47 "the minorities at risk"
project,48 and the
"state failure project,"49 use available information on human
rights practices
of states to generate global indices. Finally, survey-based data
on rights can
be found in such studies as the Eurobarometer (and now World
Barometer)
series and the World Values Survey.50 Physicians for Human
Rights has

begun doing surveys of "at risk" populations in Afghanistan,
Sierra Leone,
and Iraq to measure the degree to which certain sectors of
society (internally
displaced people, women, and Shi'ites) experience human rights
abuses. In
addition, governments themselves have begun conducting mass
public
opinion surveys on individual perceptions of human rights. For
example,
the Home Office in the United Kingdom commissioned a
citizenship survey,
which contains a series of questions on the Human Rights Act
of 1998 and
general questions about rights and duties of UK citizens.51
42. It is equally possible to interview random samples of
populations to probe the degree to
which individuals have actually experienced human rights
violations. Such a method is
fraught with difficulties because individuals may not respond to
such questions owing to
fear, intimidation, and the possibility of recrimination. In
contrast, the individual-level
data collected by truth commissions, human rights commissions,
and NGOs rely on
"convenience samples" of those individuals willing to come

forward and volunteer
information regarding violations that have occurred to them or
those that they have
witnessed.
43. Giffard, supra note 36.
44. Thompson & Giffard, supra note 37.
45. See, e.g., Poe & T?te, supra note 4.
46. Freedom House, Freedom in the World: Political and Civil
Liberties, 1989-1990 (1990).
47. Hathaway, supra note 5.
48. Theodore Gurr, Why Minorities Rebel: A Cross National
Analysis of Communal
Mobilization and Conflict Since 1945, 14 Int'l Pol. Sci. Rev.
161 (1993).
49. Daniel C Esty et al., The State Failure Project: Early
Warning Research for US Foreign
Policy Planning, in Preventive Measures: Building Risk
Assessment and Crisis Early Warning
Systems 2 (John L. Davies & Ted R. Gurr eds., 1998).
50. Ronald Inglehart, The Silent Revolution: Changing Values
and Political Styles among Western
Publics (1977); Ronald Inglehart, Culture Shift in Advanced
Industrial Societies (1990); Ronald
Inglehart, Modernization and Postmodernization (1997); Ronald
Inglehart, Political Values,

in Comparative Politics: The Problem of Equivalence (Jan W.
Van Deth ed., 1998).
51. Home Office of the United Kingdom, 2001 Home Office
Citizenship Survey: People, Families and
Communities, Home Office Research Study 270 (2001),
available afwww.homeoffice.gov.uk.
13:48:57 PM
FIGURE 6
Events Data from the Pinochet Years (1979-1986):
Intimidation and Harassment; Torture and Mistreatment
2000
1800
1600
1400
_ 1200
z
? 1000 CD > LU
800

600
400
200
0
-
Intimidation/Harassment
Torture/Mistreatment
1979 1980 1981 1982 1983
Year
1984 1985 1986
See Randy B. Reiter et al., Guidelines for Field Reporting of
Basic Human Rights Violations, in
Human Rights and Statistics: Getting the Record Straight 116-
20 (1992).
Figures 6, 7, and 8 provide examples of the three different types
of data
depicting rights in practice. Figure 6 is an example of events-
based data for
state practices under the Pinochet regime in Chile from 1979 to
1986. The
information for the data came from the Chilean Human Rights

Commission,52
and the figure depicts the number of reported instances of
harassment and
intimidation on the one hand, and torture and mistreatment on
the other.
Figure 7 shows the abstract measures of civil and political
rights from
Freedom House, personal integrity rights, and torture in the
world between
1976 and 2000. Freedom House has a standard checklist it uses
to code
civil and political rights based on press reports and country
sources about
state practices and then derives a scale that ranges from one
(full protection)
52. Randy B. Reiter et al., Guidelines for Field Reporting of
Basic Human Rights Violations,
in Human Rights and Statistics: Getting the Record Straight,
supra note 12, at 90.
13:48:57 PM

FIGURE 7
Standards-based Measures for the World 1976-2000
3.5
v 2.5
1.5
,?* S
S
N ^
-FH Political Rights
- FH Civil Rights
? - Torture Scale (Hathaway)
-Amnesty PIR
-State Department PIR
i-1-1-1-1-1-1-1-1-1-1-1-1-1-1-1-i-1-1-1-1-1-1-1
Year
to seven (full violation).53 The personal integrity rights
measures are abstract
scales that range from one (full protection) to five (full
violation) for state
practice that include torture, political imprisonment, unlawful
killing, and
disappearance. Information for these scales comes from the US

State
53. The checklist for political liberties includes chief authority
recently elected by a
meaningful process; legislature recently elected by a meaningful
process; fair election
laws, campaigning opportunity, polling, and tabulation; fair
reflection of voter prefer
ence in the distribution of power; multiple political parties;
recent shifts in power
through elections; significant opposition vote; free of military
or foreign control; major
groups or groups allowed reasonable self-determination;
decentralized political power;
and informal consensus, de facto opposition power. The
checklist for civil liberties
includes media and literature free of political censorship; open
public discussion;
freedom of assembly and demonstration; freedom of political or
quasi-political organiza
tion; nondiscriminatory rule of law in politically relevant cases;
freedom from unjustified
political terror or imprisonment; free trade unions, peasant
organizations, or equivalent;
free businesses or cooperatives; free professional or other
private organizations; free
religious institutions; personal social rights; and socioeconomic
rights. See Raymond D.
Gastil, Freedom in the World: Political and Civil Liberties,

1988-1989 (1989); Raymond D.
Gastil, Freedom in the World: Political and Civil Liberties,
1986-1987 (1987); Raymond D.
Gastil, The Comparative Survey of Freedom: Experiences and
Suggestions, 25 Stud.
Comp. Int'l Dev. 25 (1990); Freedom House, supra note 46; see
also available at www.
freedomhouse.org/research/freeworld/2000/methodology.
13:48:57 PM
FIGURE 8
World Values Survey (1994) Question on Support for the Idea
of Human Rights
in 1990 Across Eight Countries (1002
< N < 2095)
96
94
92

90
88
86
84 ]'?:
82 J?I-1?,?I-1??J-1?:??-1??I-1??I-1?,?I-1?,?I
France UK Germany Netherlands USA Mexico Brazil Chile
Country
Department and Amnesty International country reports.54 In
similar fashion,
Hathaway measures torture on a one to five scale using
information from
the US State Department.55 Finally, Figure 8 shows the
frequency response
on the "support for human rights'' question contained in the
World Values
Survey, which interviewed random samples of individuals from
forty-three
societies between 1981 and 1990. On this particular question,
which was
posed in the 1990 survey, there were responses from eight
countries.
Although this article has focused primarily on the measurement
of civil
and political rights, it is possible to extend the methodological

discussion to
include the measurement of economic, social, and cultural
rights. Despite
the common plea for all human rights to be indivisible (as
reinforced, for
example, by the 1993 Vienna Declaration and Programme for
Action),56
many human rights scholars continue to argue that civil and
political rights
54. Poe & T?te, supra note 4.
55. Hathaway, supra note 5.
56. Vienna Declaration and Programme of Action, U.N. GAOR,
World Conf. on Hum. Rts.,
48th Sess., 22d plen. mtg., part I, U.N. Doc. A/CONF.157/24
(1993), reprinted in 32
I.L.M. 1661 (1993).
13:48:57 PM
are negative rights (i.e., what the state should not do), while
economic,

social, and (most) cultural rights are positive rights (i.e., what
the state
should do).57 This division between positive and negative
rights has
influenced the methodological discussion concerning their
measurement.
Following this division explicitly or implicitly, scholars have
argued that
it is hard to measure economic, social, and cultural rights since
their
progressive realization relies on the fiscal capacity of the state
for which no
comparable measures are possible.58 But if the denial of
economic, social,
and cultural rights is the product of particular government
practices, then it
is seems equally possible to use qualitative information to
summarize such
practices into ordinal scales similar to those used for civil and
political
rights. Overt, institutionalized, or implicit discrimination
against individuals
or groups that prevents their access to education or adequate
health
constitutes a practice that violates a right. In theory, such a
violation can be

reported and coded using events-based, standards-based, or
survey-based
data. The minorities at risk project codes the degree to which
337 different
minority and communal groups experience discrimination using
such
ordinal scales.59
Despite their development and increasingly wider use these
three types
of data (events-based, standards-based, and survey-based) are
fraught with
methodological problems. Events-based data are prone to either
under
reporting of events that did occur or over-reporting of events
that did not
occur, creating problems of selection bias and misrepresenting
data. It is
impossible to document every human rights violation, and those
organiza
tions collecting such information tend to concentrate on
conflict-stricken
societies during discrete periods of time, and thus cross-country
compari
sons using such measures is problematic.
In contrast, standards-based data establish comparability by
raising the

level of abstraction but have a tendency to truncate the variation
of human
rights protection across different countries. In other words, their
use of a
simple limited scale may group together certain countries that
actually show
a great difference in their protection of human rights. While
these scales
present a general picture of the human rights situation and are
useful for
drawing comparative inferences, they necessarily sacrifice the
kind of
specificity for pursuing direct legal action against perpetrators.
Finally, survey data, especially those used across different
political
contexts, are prone to cultural biases, where the meaning of
standardized
57. Davidson, supra note 19; Peter Jones, Rights (1995).
58. Foweraker & Landman, supra note 11 ; Keith, supra note 5.
59. Joe Foweraker & Roman Krznaric, Measuring Liberal
Democratic Performance: A
Conceptual and Empirical Critique, 48 Pol. Stud. 759 (2000);
Gurr, supra note 48.
13:48:57 PM

questions on rights protection are differently understood in
different countries.
In this way, the debate about the universality of human rights
affects the
method of measuring rights through surveys since it is not
obvious that
human rights are understood to mean the same thing across the
world.60 It
is important therefore that those measuring human rights in
practice
recognize the limits of their data.
C. Government Policies and Outcomes
In addition to rights in principle and rights in practice, it is
possible to
provide more indirect measures of human rights using aggregate
statistics on
the outcomes of government policies. In her contribution to a
2001
conference on human rights impact assessment, Fukuda-Parr

makes the
useful distinction between human rights conduct and
developmental
outcomes that may have a bearing on human rights.61 She
stresses the fact
that certain dimensions of conduct and outcomes are simply not
prone to
quantifiable measurement.62 In the language of this present
article, her
distinction fits well with the difference between rights in
practice (conduct)
and government policy (outcomes).
In contrast, however, this article argues that practices and
outcomes are
more readily quantifiable than Fukuda-Parr assumes.63 The
discussion in the
60. Anthropologists, sociologists, and political scientists who
adopt culturalist perspectives
have long grappled with these issues. On the one hand, the
sceptics argue that there are
limits to cross-cultural and transnational understandings of
human rights, and any
attempt to measure them using a survey instrument will
necessarily fail. See Alasdair C
MacIntyre, Against the Self-Images of the Age: Essays on
Ideology and Philosophy 260-79

(1971 ). On the other hand, there are those who argue that
cross-cultural measurement of
human rights is possible since there are "homeomorphic
equivalents" of rights that can
be probed using social scientific methods. See also Alison D.
Renteln, International Human
Rights: Universalism Versus Relativism (1990). Indeed, in
political science, comparative
scholars have long been measuring popular attitudes toward
government, political
institutions, and the degree to which citizens can participate
effectively in governmental
processes. The Civic Culture Revisited (Gabriel Almond &
Sidney Verba eds., 1989);
Inglehart, The Silent Revolution, supra note 50; Inglehart,
Culture Shift in Advanced Industrial
Societies, supra note 50; Inglehart, Modernization and
Postmodernization, supra note 50;
Inglehart, Political Values, supra note 50. In many cases, they
identify "functional
equivalents" across different governmental institutions in order
to allow for cross-cultural
comparison. See aIso Mattei Dogan & Dominique P?lassy, How
to Compare Nations: Strategies

in Comparative Politics (2d ed. 1990); Landman, Issues and
Methods in Comparative Politics,
supra note 40; Landman, Comparative Politics and Human
Rights, supra note 40.
61. Sakiko Fukuda-Parr, Indicators of Human Rights and Human
Development: Overlaps
and Differences, 2 Stat. J. UN Econ. Comm. 239-48 (2001).
62. Marike Radstaake & Daan Bronkhorst, Matching Practice
with Principles, Human Rights Impact
Assessment: EU Opportunities 31-32 (2002).
63. Fukuda-Parr, supra note 61.
13:48:57 PM
preceding section demonstrated that human rights scholars have
long been
measuring rights in practice, albeit with a greater emphasis on
civil and
political rights. Qualitative information on the degree to which
certain
categories of rights have been violated is either summarized
quantitatively

(events data), translated into comparable quantitative ordinal
scales (stan
dards-based data), or acquired through individual level data
collection
techniques (survey-based data).
Traditionally, development studies and development economics
have
often relied on quantitative indicators of the outcomes of
government
policies, including gross domestic product, gross domestic
product per
capita, income inequality, and expenditure on health, education,
and
welfare, among many others.64 Indeed, the UNDP's human
development
index (HDI) combines per capita income (standard of living)
with literacy
rates (knowledge), and life expectancy at birth (longevity).65
While not
providing a direct measure of rights protection per se, such
measures can
elucidate the degree to which governments support activities
that have an
impact on human rights. In addition, development indicators
have been

increasingly employed as proxy measures the progressive
realization of
economic, social, and cultural rights.
Article 2 of the International Covenant on Economic, Social and
Cultural Rights requires states to take steps, to the maximum of
their
available resources, towards the progressive realization of these
rights; steps
that states use to set goals, targets, and time frames for national
plans to
implement these rights.66 Development indicators are thus seen
as suitable
proxy measures to capture the degree to which states are
implementing
these obligations. For example, literacy rates and gender
breakdown of
educational attainment are seen as proxy measures of the right
to education;
daily per capita supply of calories and other nutritional rates are
seen as
proxy measures of the right to food; and under-five mortality
rates and the
numbers of doctors per capita are seen as proxy measures of the
right to
health.67

To date, development indicators have primarily been applied to
economic and social rights, but aggregate statistics can equally
be used to
measure civil and political rights. Following the work of the
United States
Agency for International Development (USAID) new efforts
propose the use
64. The World Bank has over 500 separate indicators for the
whole world for the period
1960 to the present, available aiwww.worldbank.org for
information to its on-line world
development indicators (WDI) database.
65. United Nations Development Programme (UNDP), Human
Development Report 127-37 (1999).
66. ICESCR, supra note 27, art. 2.
67. Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights, Draft
Guidelines on a Human Rights
Approach to Poverty Reduction Strategies (Paul Hunt et al. eds.,
2002).
13:48:57 PM

of development indicators as potential proxy measures for civil
and political
rights.68 For example, investment in prison and police reform,
the processing
of cases, and the funding of judiciaries are all seen as proxy
measures for
state commitment to upholding civil and political rights. The
extension of
such indicators for measuring cultural rights is also possible.
The social and
spatial mobility of ethnic and cultural minority populations, as
well as
spending on bilingual education can approximate the degree to
which
countries are adopting policies that uphold their cultural rights
obligations.
In short, aggregate measures of provision can depict the degree
to which
governments are committed to putting in place the kinds of
resources
needed to have a "rights-protective regime" in place.69
IV. SUMMARY AND IMPLICATIONS
This final section reviews the degree to which work has been
carried out in

providing human rights measures across their different
dimensions and
considers four main implications for continued work in this
area. This article
has argued that the measurement of human rights is vital for
continued
vigilance on human rights abuses, and it relies on careful
documentation of
such abuses, and it can operationalize different categories of
human rights
for systematic analysis. It has shown that human rights can be
measured in
principle, in practice, and as outcomes of policy. Table 1
summarizes these
three modes of measurement with one column for each and with
separate
rows for definitions of each mode, general descriptions of
relevant indica
tors, and specific descriptions of indicators broken down across
the different
categories of human rights. Various efforts to date have
produced measures
for the different cells in the table, where some cells have
received more
attention owing to differences in intellectual interests,
availability of

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