Examining the indivisibility of human rights: A statistical analysis

ABSTRACT

This article tests the claim that human rights are indivisible. If human rights are indeed indivisible then an examination of the relationships between different rights should reveal a strong, bidirectional, and simultaneous link between either all rights (systematic indivisibility) or only some rights (partial indivisibility). To test the components of this claim, descriptive and inferential statistical analyses were used to assess the relationship between eleven human rights. The results of Granger causality tests, the comparison of correlation coefficients, and the comparison of the conditional probabilities of state respect for human rights support the claim that some pairs of rights are indeed indivisible although the same cannot be said for the whole system of rights. In other words, this article finds that human rights are partially indivisible. This finding has important implications for the study and implementation of rights and rights reform.

Notes

1. There is, however, an ongoing debate concerning whether this causal link must exist between all human rights or just some of them.

2. For instance, Nickel (2008) argues that the indivisibility of rights is “official doctrine” of the United Nations. Whelan, however, notes that “the U.N. itself has never actually defined indivisibility, interdependency, or interrelatedness” (2010: 3). Instead, the United Nations has provided what Nickel (2007) refers to as a “representative formulation” that is perhaps best expressed in the 1977 General Assembly Resolution 32/130. It reads: “All human rights and fundamental freedoms are indivisible and interdependent; equal attention and urgent consideration should be given to the implementation, promotion, and protection of both civil and political, and economic, social, and cultural rights United Nations 1977: 172).”

3. The International Bill of Human Rights is an informal term that refers to the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights, and the Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights.

4. The initial division of human rights was largely the result of Cold War politics. The Soviet bloc and developing states were in favor of a binding treaty that addressed what have come to be known as economic, social, and cultural rights but looked unfavorably on civil and political rights. The Anglo-American sphere, in contrast, took the opposite view. Both Scott (1989) and Whelan (2010), however, argue that Cold War politicking were not the only factors that led to the division of UN recognized human rights into two distinct categories.

5. For instance, Cardenas (2007) argues that states are subjected to simultaneous pressures to violate and respect human rights. In particular, she argues that proviolation constituencies, national security threats, and rules of exception/exclusion can encourage a state to violate human rights, even when a government is otherwise interested in respecting human rights: Proviolation constituencies are groups that, in some way, benefit from human rights violations; national security threats refer to threats to a state's territorial or economic well-being; and rules of exception and/or exclusion refer to the “conditions under which a state can trade one set of norms for another, or when an international norm can be violated” (Cardenas 2007: 28). Overall, these cross-cutting pressures can lead to inconsistencies in a state's respect for human rights: One right may be upheld while another is violated. Similarly, Shor (2008) finds that human rights violations “are not inseparable, and a decrease in some violations can occur while other violations grow concurrently” (Shor 2008: 130).

6. Instead, we observe a variety of different patterns of change across the different physical-integrity rights over time (see Table 3). Additionally, we find no significant difference when comparing the conditional probabilities across these periods. One would expect such consistent convergence to be less likely given the change in reporting standards observed by Clark and Sikkink (2013) and Fariss (2014).

7. Instead, we find that rights, in general, are more prone to converge at the value indicating the highest degree of respect over all time periods when the sample is broken down into 5-year samples.

8. There are two reasons for excluding women's rights in this study. First, the women's rights measures are likely not comparable to the other measures used in this study since they reflect a higher level of analysis. The three measures of women's rights capture state respect for certain classes of human rights — such as economic rights, political rights, and social rights — whereas the other 11 measures of human rights capture state respect for individual human rights. For instance, the right to electoral self-determination focuses on one specific right: “the right of citizens to change their government through free and fair elections” (Cingranelli and Richards 2008: 59). In contrast, the CIRI measure of women's political rights takes account of several individual rights, such as the right to vote, the right to run for political office, the right to hold elected and appointed government positions, the right to join political parties, and the right to petition government officials (Cingranelli and Richards 2008: 71).

Second, and perhaps more importantly, the measures of women's rights capture state respect for human rights in principle (in law) and in practice whereas the other measures used in this study focus uniquely on state practice. Ten of the 11 measures of human rights examined in the body of this article specifically capture state practice concerning human rights as opposed to state law on the matter. For instance, the coding instructions for the freedom of association state that “it is important to remember when coding Freedom of Assembly and Association that it is the actual practices of governments being coded, not what legal protections that exist” (Cingranelli and Richards 2008: 53). In contrast, all three measures of women's rights capture both state practice and the state law when evaluating respect for human rights. For instance, the coding instructions for women's political rights states that “In measuring women's political rights we are primarily interested in two things: one, the extensiveness of laws pertaining to women's economic rights; and two, government practices towards women or how effectively the government enforces the laws” (Cingranelli and Richards 2008: 71).

9. Nickel's (2008) logic-based argument notes that indivisibility among rights is observable at all levels of analysis.

10. No control variables were included in the regressions.

11. When using the Granger method on time-series datasets, this is not an issue. We also tested the data to ensure that it was stationary, a requirement for Granger tests (Hood, Kidd, and Morris 2008).

12. Specifically, any two rights measures x and y are marked with * if Probability (x–y = 0) < Prob (|x–y| = 1) + 2xProb(|x–y| = 2), that is, the probability of a difference occurring between two rights measures is weighted by the size of the difference between them.

13. The results from Table 3 were omitted since the lack of statistical significance across all the time periods for many of the rights makes a comparison to the results in the other tables difficult to interpret.

14. The difference is statistically significant.

15. The difference is statistically significant.

16. The Granger causality test hints at possible causal ties based on the logic that the cause must precede the effect. Table 2 illustrates that the majority of rights pairs exhibits such a relationship, either in one direction or both. Another possible explanation for this pattern, however, is the presence of a latent variable — that is, influencing the values of the observed variables — whose value is contingent on prior values of the same latent variable. Schnakenberg and Fariss (2014) find that the four CIRI measures of physical-integrity rights and the seven CIRI measures of empowerment rights are each part of a unidimensional scale when hierarchical priors are included in the models: These findings support the possibility that the observed pattern is due to the effect of two latent variables: respect for physical-integrity rights and respect for empowerment rights.

17. Cingranelli and Richards (1999a) use an ordinal item-response theory model whereas Schnakenberg and Fariss (2014) use a dynamic ordinal item-response theory model.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Stephanie Soiffer

Stephanie Soiffer, PhD Candidate in International Affairs at The Norman Paterson School of International Affairs, Carleton University (2010–present). Her research interests include human rights and human development.

Dane Rowlands

Dane Rowlands, PhD in Economics (University of Toronto, 1994); Professor, The Norman Paterson School of International Affairs, Carleton University (1994 – present). He is the director of the Norman Paterson School of International Affairs. His primary research interests are in international debt, multilateral financial institutions, official development assistance, and the international aspects of economic development.