II. >> C onceptualizing Indicators for Human Rights >> Issues to address in human rights measurement How do we go about selecting potential indicators of what we want to measure? There has to be a structured approach with a set of well-defined criteria that can be consistently applied to identify and develop indicators for different human rights. Such an approach has to be conceptually coherent, capable of supporting the identification of contextually relevant and methodologically feasible indicators (for the methodological aspects of the framework, see chap. III). It is important to have a solid conceptual basis for the indicators and not to reduce the exercise to a random listing of options. More specifically, an adequate conceptual framework is expected to reveal the link between the means and policy instruments on the one hand, and the desired outcomes on the other. Some knowledge of this relationship between outcomes and their determinants is particularly important to identify indicators that will help in furthering the implementation of human rights, versus the limited objective of identifying indicators merely to quantify their state of realization. For instance, specific information on the number of arbitrary detentions in a particular country, while reflecting the incidence or the magnitude of the human rights violation, does not reveal anything about why the right to liberty is not being respected, protected or promoted. That requires indicators that quantify information on these other aspects of the issue. How many indicators are required to assess the implementation of a human right? The natural inclination may be to limit the number of indicators to monitor the implementation of a specific right. However, their number will depend on the context and on the objective of the exercise. For instance, in a national or subnational context of monitoring entitlements to civil, cultural, economic, political and social rights, it may be necessary to monitor an extended set of indicators to comprehensively capture all aspects of those rights and the progress in the corresponding obligations. This could be the case for monitoring the right to information in the many countries where it is guaranteed, or the right to education and the right to work in India, where recent legislation provides for circumscribed legal guarantees for these rights. This could also be the case when a special procedure mechanism at the international level or at the national level (e.g., Brazil) has the mandate to monitor a specific right or a human rights issue. At the same time, depending on the human rights concerns in a country, a State party or treaty body may wish to focus on only a few or a subset of indicators identified for a human rights standard. Nevertheless, it is important to have a comprehensive set of indicators on human rights standards, with the actual choice of indicators made by the users in the light of their objective and their national context. Human Rights Indicators 29