II. >> C onceptualizing Indicators for Human Rights >> The conceptual framework There are two considerations that are important in the selection and formulation of process indicators. The first is to ensure that a process indicator links, preferably through a conceptual or an empirical relationship, a structural indicator to its corresponding outcome indicator. Thus, for instance, a process indicator of the right to health—“proportion of schoolchildren educated on health and nutrition issues”—is chosen so that it can be related to the corresponding structural indicator, namely “time frame and coverage of national policy on child health and nutrition”, as well as to the outcome indicator—“proportion of underweight children under five years of age”. Similarly, for the right not to be subjected to torture, the indicator “proportion of custodial staff formally investigated for physical and non-physical abuse or crime on detained or imprisoned persons” relates the structural indicator “date of entry into force of code of conduct for law enforcement officials, including rules of conduct for the interrogation of arrested, detained and imprisoned persons” with the outcome indicator “reported cases of torture or cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment”.6 The second consideration in giving shape to a process indicator is to bring out explicitly some measure of the effort being made by the duty bearer in meeting its obligation. Thus, indicators like “proportion of law enforcement officials and custodial staff formally investigated for physical and non-physical abuse or crime” or “proportion and frequency of enterprises inspected for conformity with labour standards” combined with “proportion of those investigations resulting in administrative action or prosecution”, or “proportion of victims of sexual and other violence with access to appropriate medical, psychosocial and legal services”, “proportion of targeted population covered under public nutrition supplement programmes”, or “proportion of population that received access to improved sanitation in the reporting period” are included in the category of process indicators. At times, this means reformulating a commonly available indicator (in the last example an MDG indicator), or requiring some additional estimation on the basic information of the indicator. Outcome indicators Outcome indicators capture individual and collective attainments that reflect the state of enjoyment of human rights in a given context. An outcome indicator consolidates over time the impact of various underlying processes (that can be captured by one or more process indicators); it is often a slow moving indicator, less sensitive to capturing momentary changes than a process indicator.7 For example, life expectancy or mortality indicators could be a function of immunization of the population, public health awareness of the population, accessibility to adequate nutrition or a reduction in physical violence and crime. Similarly, outcomes related to reported cases of torture or cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment can ordinarily be related to processes that seek to train law enforcement officials in undertaking investigations, measures for improved accountability of their conduct and the conditions of detention. 6. Also, it is desirable for the process indicator to be measured in terms of the physical and other tangible improvement that it generates rather than in terms of the resources that go into the process concerned. This is because experience across countries and across regions within the same country reveals that there is no monotonic relationship between public expenditure and the physical outcome that such expenditure generates. The physical outcome is a function of resources and other institutional and non-institutional factors that vary from place to place and thereby make it difficult to interpret indicators on public expenditure. For instance, it is possible that a lower per capita public expenditure produces better outcomes in one region than in another region in the same country. 7. There is some similarity in process and outcome indicators which comes from the fact that any process can be measured either in terms of the inputs going into a process or in terms of the immediate outputs that the process generates. Thus, a process indicator on the coverage of immunization among children can be measured in terms of the public resources or expenditure going into the immunization programme (which is the input variant) or in terms of the proportion of children covered under the programme (which is an output variant). In terms of the definition outlined in this note, both these indicators are process indicators. They contribute to lowering child mortality, which is an outcome indicator as it captures the consolidated impact of the immunization programme over a period of time and it can be more directly related to the enjoyment of the right-to-health attribute on “child mortality and health care”. Human Rights Indicators 37