PLEASE NOTE THAT the website is now suspended!!
Rankings of countries are popular at least with the media and public. That is also true for human rights. There is already the annual Freedom House survey as well as the UNDP development-oriented one. Now, on 17 October, the Global Network for Rights and Development [GNRD] – created in 2008 and based in Stavanger, Norway – has published a new one, that tries to combine all social and economic indicators. It calls itself without much modesty “the Most Trustful and Complete International Human Rights Rank Indicator“, reflecting Live Data on the respect for human rights in 216 countries. The website states that it acts “in cooperation with various international organizations, governments and other NGOs to make the outcomes full and veritable. More than two thousand individuals all over the world are collecting and entering information constantly. The countries’ human rights rank indicator depends on a complex calculation of the respect for 21 interconnected human rights, including the evaluation of respect for human rights abroad, and the rights’ values. The new Indicator’s website offers to any person from any corner of the world an advantage to influence on the countries’ rank and significantly contribute to the protection of the human rights by registering a violation case in the online system….. Thus, we introduced today a real, free of bias, unique in its implementation International Human Rights Rank Indicator ihrri.com.”
The problem is that verification of these claims is not possible without knowing more of the methodology, the data used and especially the ‘authorised organisations’ that are NOT listed. Theoretically the listing is an interesting notion but there must be a reason that most serious human rights NGOs have not done.
In the meantime governmental Gulfnews has already picked up on it: http://gulfnews.com/news/gulf/uae/society/uae-top-for-human-rights-in-arab-countries-1.1244390
October 24, 2016 at 16:13
[…] – https://freedomhouse.org/sites/default/files/FH_FITW_Report_2016.pdf – https://thoolen.wordpress.com/2013/10/19/ranking-of-countries-on-human-rights-global-network-for-rig… [the “go” was not very long and the website is now suspended!!] […]