II. >> C onceptualizing Indicators for Human Rights >> The conceptual framework Will the identified indicators be used to rank countries according to their human rights performance? There is no intention of using this work to support an index to rank countries according to their human rights performance. Owing to the complexity of human rights, such a tool is neither easy to conceptualize, nor necessarily desirable from the point of promoting and monitoring the realization of human rights. Given that many human rights standards are multifaceted, interrelated and interdependent, it is methodologically difficult to segregate them into meaningful indices for constructing universally acceptable composite measurements for use in cross-country comparisons. More importantly, human rights are absolute standards that all societies have to strive towards; this aim cannot be diluted by creating relative performance benchmarks based on cross-country comparisons. The identified indicators, while facilitating human rights implementation and monitoring, are meant to support primarily comparisons over time in the realization and enjoyment of human rights standards within the unique context of each country and its population groups (e.g., ethnic groups). This, however, does not rule out that identified indicators can be used to undertake some comparison across countries, but such use is bound to be confined to comparing performance on a few specific human rights standards at a time, such as the right to education or the right to life or aspects of these rights (e.g., literacy rates, reported disappearances), and not the entire gamut of human rights. B. The conceptual framework The adopted framework, while addressing the common misconceptions and concerns about the use of indicators in human rights assessments (highlighted in chap. I), builds a common approach to identifying and developing indicators for promoting and monitoring civil, cultural, economic, political and social rights. To ensure that it is workable, the framework focuses on using information and data sets, qualitative as well as quantitative, that are commonly available and based on standardized data-generating mechanisms, which most State parties would find acceptable and administratively feasible to compile and 30 Human Rights Indicators follow (see chap. III for details). The framework involves a two-part approach that includes identifying the attributes of a human right, followed by a cluster of indicators that unpack specific aspects of implementing the standard associated with that right. 1 Anchoring indicators in human rights standards – importance of attributes The enumeration of human right standards in treaties and their further elaboration by the treaty-