In the preceding three chapters we argued that all indviduals have unalienable rights simply because they are human. Respecting these rights is essential for individuals to have the chance of living a life in human dignity. States have a responsibility and obligation to protect these rights, primarily within, but also outside, their own borders. Yet, as we have already shown with various examples throughout this text, for many people the protection of their human rights is a very distant ideal. Most people have at least some of their rights violated most of the time. In this chapter, we show which countries provide better, or worse, protection for specific human rights in the twenty-first century compared with other countries. Related to this, we touch on issues of measuring human rights and human rights violations. We discuss why one might want to measure and quantify the concept of human rights and then show examples of how this has been done in the study of human rights. The first section focuses on civil and political rights, before we turn to economic, social and cultural rights in the second half of this chapter.

Measuring exactly which rights of which individuals are violated when and by whom is an impossible undertaking. However, many attempts have been made to capture the extent to which certain groups of rights are violated in specific countries.