V. >> F ramework in Practice - Implementing and Monitoring Rights
>> Interpreting statistical information from a human rights perspective
The average, deprivation and inequalities
perspectives and the related disaggregation
requirement are equally relevant to the promotion
and assessment of the realization of civil, cultural,
economic, political or social rights. For instance,
statistical indicators on the incidence of crimes or
abuse, such as the proportion of women or target
Fig. XIX
population groups with specific characteristics
(e.g., age, ethnicity, wealth, educational attainment)
that are victims of violence would benefit from this
three-pronged analysis. The same could be true for
indicators on the proportion of a population group
holding managerial positions in the public or private
sectors.22
Using ratios to analyse access to education
A
Net primary enrolment ratio
B
Net primary enrolment ratio for girls
C
Net primary enrolment ratio for girls from targeted population (e.g., ethnic group/ rural)
If A > B and B > C consistently, there may be good reasons to suggest problems of access to primary
education affecting girls in general and girls from the targeted population in particular. Further
qualitative analysis would, however, always be desirable to understand the extent of the problem.
In general, human rights assessment can benefit
from the application of statistical analysis and benchmarking techniques to the available indicators:
Trend
analysis involves comparisons of suc
cessive values of an indicator over two or more
time periods. For example, one could highlight
the rapid decline in a country’s child mortality
rates (average perspective) while for certain
ethnic groups they remain stagnant (deprivation and inequality perspectives). One could
also observe the trend in budget allocations
for the administration of justice not matching
the State’s stated position and commitment to
the issue, after accounting for inflation.
22. A
s highlighted in chapter III, there are important challenges to disaggregation. In particular, it is important to know the proportion
of the considered subpopulation (e.g., ethnic group) in the total population in order to make rigorous inferences at a global level.
This underlines the importance of a census. Moreover, disaggregated data sets are smaller than the data sets from which they are
extracted. Consequently, in the case of statistical samples, the sampling error (see Glossary of statistical terms) will be higher.
130 Human Rights Indicators
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