Development and human rights: The growing demand for statistics from the international community

Abstract

The paper discusses some developments in the human rights movement. In particular the mechanisms – including statistics – that promote and protect human rights and how some of the existing mechanisms have been redefined in order to introduce the new approach of human development. The final output of these mechanisms should be promoting and protecting human rights. Statistics has also become an important tool in that direction. There is an increased demand for statistics in the field of human rights, amongst others from human rights treaty-bodies, United Nations international conferences and the follow up mechanisms of these conferences. Furthermore the human rights standards provided by international instruments have also given rise to a host of issues to be addressed by statistics. Some initiatives in the international community have been made to formulate a list of indicators that deal with issues related to human rights concerns. Thus, the human rights movement is becoming a main user of statistics; hence there is a need to build a stronger relationship between the human rights movement and the producers of statistics. The public opinion needs statistics that are easy to deal with in order to take appropriate action.