III. >> M  ethodological Approaches to Human Rights Indicators >> Sources and data-generating mechanisms Box 14 Statistical tools for recording human rights abuse - Sri Lanka Metagora project Civil society has been an essential alternative source of credible information on human rights abuse and violations. However, the reporting of human rights abuses is not always systematic and credible, among other reasons because there is not enough awareness of the methodology for standardizing the information collected and there are insufficient resources to build records over time and space. There is a need to build the capacities of civil society to use statistical methods to strengthen their analytical and advocacy efforts. To sustain local civil society human rights monitoring, the Metagora project provided technical support to the Asia Foundation’s “Mapping Political and Ethnic Violence in Sri Lanka” project. The Human Rights Accountability Coalition, a group of civil society organizations which had been collecting and analysing data on human rights violations, received statistical and other technical training. Using national expertise, harmonized forms and vocabularies were devised to standardize the coding of narrative reports of human rights events and the outcomes associated with those events into measurable data. This helped put different data sets into one framework and ensured consistent recording of human rights abuse. Data cleaning and other quality control exercises were also introduced to support proper evidence-based analysis of human rights violations by civil society. The exercise demonstrated how such organizations can benefit from the introduction of statistical and other quantitative tools and be further empowered through improvements in their reporting and research advocacy and human rights monitoring functions. Source: Naval, Walter and Suarez de Miguel, Measuring Human Rights and Democratic Governance. The Chilean Human Rights Commission (created in 1978) used events-based data to compile quantitative indicators on the magnitude of human rights violations during the repressive military regime. It published monthly reports indicating the number of known victims for a few categories of human rights violations, such as “intimidation/harassment”, “arbitrary political detention”, “torture/ mistreatment”, “disappearance” and “killing”.14 In Nepal, the Informal Sector Service Center has been producing a Human Rights Yearbook since 1992,15 recording information on events related to different kinds of human rights violations. Similarly, the work undertaken under the aegis of AAAS to provide technical assistance to official truth commissions (Haiti, South Africa, Guatemala, Peru, Sierra Leone and Timor-Leste) and the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia on assessing and quantifying the incidence of human rights violations has brought to the forefront the efficacy of this method in monitoring human rights violations.16 14. The example of Chile is quoted in R. Reiter, M. Zunzunegui and J. Quiroga, “Guidelines for field reporting of basic human rights violations”, in Human Rights and Statistics. 15. For details see www.insec.org.np. 16. See also the work of the social enterprise Benetech on human rights (www.benetech.org/human_rights/). Human Rights Indicators 55