III. >> M  ethodological Approaches to Human Rights Indicators >> Ethical, statistical and human rights considerations in indicator selection A. Ethical, statistical and human rights considerations in indicator selection There are several methodological considerations that should guide the process of selecting indicators for use in human rights assessments. The collection, processing and dissemination of any statistical information have implications for the right to information, the right to privacy, data protection and confidential- Box 9 ity, and require conforming to legal and institutional standards related to ethics, statistics and human rights. The three main human rights principles in relation to data-collection processes are selfidentification, participation and data protection (see boxes 9 to 11). Misuse of data—the dark side of numbers Looking back, it is possible to rake over mistakes, motivated actions as well as omissions by the State. An investigation by Seltzer and Anderson into the misuse of prevalent population data systems in perpetuating human rights abuses in the history of modern nations is quite revealing. During the Second World War, several European countries, including France, Germany, the Netherlands, Norway, Poland and Romania, abused population registration systems to aid Nazi persecution of Jews, Gypsies and other population groups. The Jewish population suffered a death rate of 73 per cent in the Netherlands. In the United States of America, misuse of population data on Native Americans and Japanese Americans in the Second World War is well documented. In the Soviet Union, micro data (including specific names and addresses) were used to target minority populations for forced migration and other human rights abuses. In Rwanda, categories of Hutu and Tutsi tribes introduced in the registration system by the Belgian colonial administration in the 1930s were used to plan and assist mass killings in 1994. Seltzer and Anderson identify ideology, racism, patriotism, obedience due to fear, bureaucratic opportunism or professional zeal as possible factors that encourage the misuse of data. They suggest several methodological, legal and ethical safeguards to mitigate future abuse of data by raising its financial or political cost. Some of these measures are: To the extent possible, use of sample surveys should be encouraged instead of full-count (census) data-gathering. Moreover, responses should be grouped and person-specific identifiers should be stripped to protect the identity of the respondents; P opulation data should be decentralized and the creation of a bridge file (e.g., where data are stored in another country outside the jurisdiction of local courts) encouraged, particularly in countries where the requisite institutions are weak and easy to influence; T here should be a legal provision for data confidentiality, which is a standard feature of a modern statistical system; and Ethical safeguards such as the Fundamental Principles of Official Statistics or the Declaration on Professional Ethics of the International Statistical Institute (ISI) should be adopted and enforced with a view to creating an institutional framework that helps in preventing future misuse of data. Source: W. Seltzer and M. Anderson, “The dark side of numbers: the role of population data systems in human rights abuses”, Social Research, vol. 68, No. 2 (summer 2001). 46 Human Rights Indicators