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Dear ,

This time it's Thalia here, HRMI's Strategy and Communication Lead, based in the Wellington office in New Zealand. Tēnā koutou katoa!

I'm sure like me, you're having a strange year, with Covid-19 at the front of your mind. For us, and perhaps for you, the pandemic raises a lot of questions about how governments respond to emergencies in a way that best protects people's human rights - from the right to health, to the right to freedom of assembly.

HRMI's role in the human rights ecosystem is to find robust, credible answers to these questions - answers that go beyond anecdotal evidence or government statements. So in 2021 our annual survey of human rights experts will include questions about how Covid-19 has affected people's human rights - for good or for ill. Then we'll have some numbers, and be able to track changes in people's enjoyment of their rights.

Thanks to generous donations in our September crowd-funding campaign we are also pleased to announce that we are expanding our survey to Hong Kong, Malaysia, and Taiwan next year. We're already building relationships with the human rights communities of those places, so please let us know if you can introduce us to someone who might be interested in participating in our survey, or using the resulting scores. We'll also be running the Pacific Module for the second year, overseen by our Pacific Data Co-Leads, Patrick Thomsen and Sam Manuela.

If you expect to be a survey respondent in early 2021, please look out for our survey links in your email in January - and please add @humanrightsmeasurement.org to your safe senders list now. Thank you!

As 2020 closes, we thank you for your interest in our work, and wish you and your communities all the best in navigating these challenging times. 

Ngā manaakitanga (with love and care for you all)
Thalia Kehoe Rowden
Strategy and Communication Lead, HRMI
 

New animated video!
HRMI's methodologies can be challenging to get your head around, especially if you aren't working with numbers in your day job, or if you're a busy human rights defender.

Our latest solution? A pair of animated videos showing how our data are produced.

The first video, introducing our economic and social rights data, is out now. We'd love to know what you think.

New Zealand animator Graeme Franks worked with our whole team over several months to distil a book's worth of information into 3-minute videos.

The second one will be out in the new year, introducing our civil and political rights methodology.

https://youtu.be/7Kplyg_Fmv4



(Click here if the video doesn't show in your newsletter above.) 
How are our data making a difference?
We are always pleased to spot someone using HRMI data in their work. 

We list many of the public examples we come across on the Data in Action page of our website, and in this newsletter we're highlighting a recent one.

The United Nations Universal Periodic Review is a 5-year cycle where every country in the world has its human rights record reviewed publicly in Geneva. As part of the process, civil society organisations can write submissions, which are then summarised and published for the formal session at the UN. Governments must respond to all recommendations made, so this is a powerful tool for people's concerns to be heard and addressed. 

Indigenous rights NGO Cultural Survival recently used HRMI data on gender differences in the enjoyment of the right education in their UPR submission: Observations on the State of Indigenous Human Rights in the Solomon Islands. Their submission will now be summarised and included in recommendations that the Solomon Islands government will respond to in April/May 2021. We are very encouraged to see our data being used in this powerful way. 

Any organisation can use our data in the UPR. For more on this, please see our recent guide.
Website languages now include Russian and Chinese!
In big news, we are working to make our general HRMI website available in Chinese and Russian. It was already available in EnglishFrenchSpanish, and Portuguese

Newly available, right now:

The HRMI website in Russian
The HRMI website in Chinese

The Rights Tracker will also be available in Chinese in January 2021. The addition of Chinese to both websites has been made possible partly thanks to a grant from the Taiwan Foundation for Democracy. 

We also have plans to make the Rights Tracker available in both Russian and Arabic, as soon as we can secure funding for those projects. If you have ideas of foundations or individuals who may want to fund us to make our human rights information available in Arabic, please let us know. 
New project with New Zealand Human Rights Commission
We're excited to begin a new project, in collaboration with the New Zealand Human Rights Commission.

NZHRC has engaged HRMI to explore New Zealand’s performance in upholding the rights to health and housing. Our economic and social rights team will identify and analyse rights indicators, to demonstrate New Zealand’s progressive realisation (or non-realisation) of these rights, and how New Zealand compares compared to the international benchmark.

Susan Randolph is leading this work, alongside Jay Stewart, Livvy Mitchell, and Paddy Baylis.
HRMI welcomes remote interns
How do students get their usual work experience during a pandemic? 

One way is through remote internships, as a dozen students from around the world are doing right now, with HRMI. The first cohort of nine began in early December, and are based in Ireland, Canada, Turkey, India, New Zealand, and the United States. From their homes, they are meeting the team, becoming familiar with the Rights Tracker, and getting started on projects to help get our work into the hands of human rights practitioners.

Please visit our website team page to get to know some of them - they are a very impressive bunch!
New journal article from the HRMI team
We’re delighted to have a new peer-reviewed article on our civil and political rights methodology published in the Journal of Peace Research:

“Using practitioner surveys to measure human rights: The Human Rights Measurement Initiative’s civil and political rights metrics”
K Chad Clay, Ryan Bakker, Anne-Marie Brook, Daniel W Hill, Jr, Amanda Murdie, in Journal of Peace Research, October 2020.

You can read it here as a free PDF download.

Here’s the abstract:

“Most cross-national datasets of civil and political rights practices have relied on internationally distributed English language secondary sources as the core source of information for their metrics. This approach has yielded data that are highly reliable, but also suffer from the fact that their information sources under-represent the overall level of abuse internationally and do so in a way that is biased across countries. The combined knowledge of the individual human rights practitioners working to directly monitor the abuses occurring within a country would likely serve to overcome much of this biased under-reporting, but it is difficult to compare that knowledge across country and cultural contexts. In this article, we discuss how we overcome these problems in the Human Rights Measurement Initiative (HRMI) civil and political rights data. Using an expert survey that contains anchoring vignettes in concert with Bayesian scaling techniques, we present a new methodology for collecting and aggregating data on the intensity and distribution of respect for eight separate civil and political rights.”

(If you missed our earlier article this year, in the Journal of Human Rights, you can read that on our website, too.)
New on the website
As always, there's plenty to catch up on on our website and around the web.
Pass it on!
Thanks for your interest in HRMI. You are also most welcome to follow us on TwitterYouTubeLinkedIn, and Facebook to keep up to date in between newsletters. 

Please also feel free to contact us directly with feedback, ideas, and requests. We're here to help.

Human Rights Measurement Initiative
Motu Economic and Public Policy Research

Level 1, 97 Cuba St
PO Box 24390
Wellington
New Zealand

Website: Click here







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