Translator: Anne-Marie Brook Reviewer: Leonardo Silva
You understand the importance of light and the truth, right?
Imagine a world without them.
I’m here to talk about how we need more, of both.
I’m going to start with a true story
about the kinds of things that happen
when too much of the world is operating in darkness.
On a warm October day in 2018,
a Saudi Arabian journalist called Jamal Khashoggi
walked into the Saudi Consulate in Istanbul,
to get some papers he needed to marry his Turkish fiancée.
She waited outside for him for hours.
She never saw him again.
You may remember hearing about this case,
because it made headlines around the world.
We know from a number of different investigations
that Saudi government agents went into the consulate,
killed Mr. Khashoggi
and dismembered his body.
Let me be clear about what I just said.
Government agents killed a journalist to silence his truths.
These kinds of happenings are both shocking and surprisingly common.
But I’m pretty sure that if the Saudi government had known
that this case would make headlines worldwide,
and stay there for weeks,
they wouldn’t have done it, right?
They wanted to commit their crimes in the dark,
not in broad daylight for all to see.
Which raises some questions.
What if we could shine a brighter light
on the world’s injustices and wrong-doings?
And what if, by doing so, we could incentivise governments everywhere
to treat people with more respect
and listen to the voices of their critics rather than silencing them?
This is the world that I’m working to create.
I’d like you to take a moment -
you’re welcome to close your eyes -
and ask yourself this question:
what is it that you and your family need
to live in dignity and fulfill your potential as human beings?
You might be thinking about good food or a roof over your head,
access to healthcare or education,
or a good job, or social security,
or you might be thinking about the freedom to be yourself
and speak your mind without fear of arrest, torture, imprisonment or worse.
These things are not luxuries. They are human rights.
They have been defined and set out in international human rights law.
Countries have made promises to respect them.
But until now,
no one has been tracking how well each country is doing
on making sure every person is able to enjoy each human right.
I know, I was surprised to learn this too.
For 20 years, I was an economist.
In the mid-2000s, I was working at the OECD in Paris,
giving economic policy advice to governments.
I really loved my job.
I found it super interesting to look at each country through the economist lens
and figure out what advice to offer.
But there was one problem.
In every country, there were human rights violations.
I was reading about mistreatment of Kurds in Turkey
and Roma in Slovakia,
and I was always kind of looking for ways
that I could try and bring these human rights issues into my reports.
But there was only so far I could go,
because when economists give advice,
it always has to be based on empirical evidence,
and what I learned is that there was no comprehensive database
tracking the human rights performance of countries.
This is a problem.
This was a problem.
When you’re assessing the state of the world,
chances are you’re going to be looking first at the things you’ve got data for:
income per person, trade and investment flows,
carbon emissions ...
It’s very difficult for any government
to put human rights at the heart of its agenda,
if they don’t have the data they need.
After that, I just couldn’t let go of the fact that there was this data gap.
A few years later, after moving back to New Zealand,
I can remember being at home with my son when he was little,
and after putting him to bed for his afternoon nap,
I felt this magnetic pull back to the computer
where I was researching who was measuring human rights.
I was contacting the world’s experts and asking them questions.
Why were human rights not being systematically measured?
Could it be done?
Lots of the emails I sent got no reply.
But many of them did.
There were a few people who told me
that this idea of systematically tracking human rights
was a good idea, but too ambitious
Only one or two people told me it was impossible, ridiculous even.
I wasn’t too bothered.
My philosophy was to go where the energy was.
And by following the energy,
I linked up with two super clever human rights academics
who shared my vision,
Susan Randolph and Chad Clay,
and together we founded the Human Rights Measurement Initiative,
or HRMI (pronounced 'hermi') for short.
Even before HRMI had $1 of funding,
we’ve been working with human rights practitioners from around the world
to make sure that we produce data
that accurately reflects the situation on the ground in different countries.
Our goal is to make sure that you can see more
than just those few headline cases, like Mr. Khashoggi's,
that make it into the news.
We are turning on more lights around the world.
I feel both privileged and humbled to be able to do the work that I do
because I know that in many other countries around the world
human rights defenders are putting their lives at risk every single day,
just for documenting the injustices that they see.
So I’m really pleased that HRMI is helping to amplify the voices
of these amazing people
so that their work can have more impact.
And I’m really pleased that the collective vision that HRMI has
is no longer just a vision; it’s now a collective endeavour.
We already have hundreds of human rights practitioners around the world
contributing, on a volunteer basis, their time and knowledge
to help turn on more lights, fill these data gaps,
bring more attention to what really matters.
So how do we measure the human rights performance of countries?
So far, we’ve got two main methodologies.
First, whenever possible, we use publicly available statistics.
For Quality of Life rights,
things like the rights to food, education, health, housing and work,
this gives us really great country coverage.
This map shows, in blue, all 169 countries
where we are tracking country performance on the right to health.
A lot of the statistical indicators that we look at are the same ones
used to monitor the United Nations' Sustainable Development Goals.
But here’s the difference: we don’t just look at the raw statistics.
We do something much more vital.
We convert them into numbers that make sense from a human rights perspective.
To do this, we have adopted an award-winning approach
that was developed by my HRMI co-founder, Susan, and her colleagues.
And what it does is it judges each country by a different benchmark
depending on that country’s level of income.
So both richer countries and poorer countries will get low scores
if they’re not using their available resources
as effectively as other countries at those income levels have done;
for example, to bring about good health outcomes.
This approach is genius,
not only because it measures how countries are doing
on the basis of how these rights are defined in international law,
but also because it’s just logical.
It makes sense to hold high income countries to a higher standard of account
for their health outcomes
than poorer countries, right?
Second, for civil and political rights, we collect the data ourselves.
These rights include all sorts of things
from killings and torture to voting rights and free speech.
You might be surprised to learn that these are all things
that official statistics just don’t keep track of.
So we brought in experts from Amnesty International,
organisations like Human Rights Watch,
and together we developed an expert survey so that we could collect this information
from people who are monitoring events on the ground in each country.
We’re really happy with how well our expert survey is working out.
So far, we have data for these 19 countries,
and that number is growing every year.
Most importantly, people tell us
that our scores accurately reflect the situation on the ground
in the countries that they are knowledgeable about.
Let me introduce you to some of our data insights
by sharing with you one quiz question.
'Which of these countries performs best
on respecting the right to freedom from extrajudicial execution?
Jordan, Venezuela, Saudi Arabia, the United States or Mexico?'
Now, while you think about it,
just let me give you a little more information.
First, a definition:
extrajudicial killings are killings by government agents,
like what happened to Mr. Khashoggi,
but more commonly things like police shootings.
And let me also tell you a little more about where the scores come from.
In February and March this year,
we sent our expert survey to people monitoring human rights
in all five of these countries, and others,
and each person told us how well they think their country is doing
on respecting this right, and others.
And we use some really sophisticated statistical techniques
for ensuring that different people’s responses
can be made comparable with one another.
Okay, so do you have in mind
what you think the answer to this question is?
The answer is Jordan.
And here you can see the scores for all five of these countries.
The little vertical solid lines that you see are our best estimate
of what the score is for each country.
Countries with wider uncertainty bands, like Saudi Arabia’s,
tell us that we are less certain exactly where the true score lies,
perhaps because there may have been less agreement
among the respondents who filled in our survey for Saudi Arabia.
Narrower uncertainty bands, like Mexico’s,
tell us that we are more certain about what the score is for that country.
The overlap of the bands is important.
We can be confident that Jordan is performing better than Venezuela
because their bands don’t overlap.
We're less confident exactly what the relative ranking would be
of the countries that come next.
Of course this is just a subset of all the countries we have data for.
Let me add in some more.
Here you can see New Zealand, Australia, South Korea and the United Kingdom.
No country gets a perfect score
because in every country, even New Zealand,
there is room for improvement.
How is this information useful?
HRMI is not an advocacy organisation,
so we don’t tell governments what they could be doing differently.
But you can use our data for that purpose.
So let’s say your country had a lowish score,
so it’s down this end of the scale,
and you want to move it that way.
What can you do?
I’m sure the possibilities are endless, but let’s just discuss a few.
You could encourage your country to embark on the challenging but vital task
of retraining your police force.
You could meet with vulnerable and minority groups
and take their advice on how to reform your institutions.
You could look at the laws and policies of your better-performing neighbours
and you could also choose to do better.
We have a scoreboard like this for eight different civil and political rights,
and for each one of them, for each country and for each right,
we also collect information on what is driving their scores.
So let’s say you wanted to know
why the United States is performing so poorly on this right.
You could learn that part of the reason
is because there are too many police shootings of people of colour.
Our US experts told us
that the people who are most at risk of extrajudicial killing in the United States
are African Americans,
Latinx people,
Native Americans,
and children detained at the border.
These insights I've shared from our database
are just some of the thousands that you can find there,
and that’s before we have even expanded our survey to all countries in the world.
I know that all of this can feel quite heavy.
That’s because it is.
So I’m happy to share with you
that we also have some really positive, good news stories
in HRMI’s database as well.
Here’s a good news chart from the Africa region.
Each of the coloured sections shows you one Quality of Life right,
and what you can see is there has been slow but gradual improvement
in the performance, on average, across the African continent.
And the good news story gets even better
because HRMI data also show a gradual trend improvement
in the fulfillment of these rights in all regions of the world.
This is a really positive human rights story.
I love it and it fills me with a lot of hope.
One thing that I’ve noticed
since making my career transition from economist to co-founder of HRMI,
is that when I catch up with old friends and I tell them
that what I’m now doing is measuring the human rights performance of countries,
I sometimes get these kind of somewhat blank looks.
When I used to tell people that I was helping to improve economic performance,
I would get more nods of understanding.
And I get it.
The economy is really well measured. People are used to hearing about it.
By contrast, human rights have been under-reported, under-measured
and overlooked for too long.
Let’s change that.
Shedding a light on human rights
and bringing about a massive change in the way our world works
is a huge global collaborative challenge,
and you can help.
We have started by shedding a light on your country.
What does it reveal that you can act on?
What will you demand of your leaders?
What other countries can inspire yours
to better and bolder respect for human rights?
What if world’s leaders summoned their advisors and demanded answers?
What if they said not just, ‘Tell me how to improve our economic performance!’,
but, ‘Tell me how to improve our human rights performance'?
Numbers are not as sexy as stories.
They don’t pull on the heartstrings
in the same way.
But each one helps to light up our world, showing us the way ahead.
Numbers help us figure out what needs to change, and how.
Let’s build a world where countries are competing,
not just in sport and to see who can be the richest,
but to see who can treat their people the best.
Let’s measure what we treasure.
Thank you.
(Applause)