From 2004 to 2014, the Cingranelli-Richards (CIRI) Human Rights Data Project annually rated the level of government respect for a variety of internationally recognized human rights. The final CIRI data set contains quantitative indicators of 15 human rights for 195 countries, annually from 1981 to 2011. The CIRI data were used in over 170 countries by scholars, students, policymakers, and analysts representing over 400 organizations. CIRI's founders and co-directors were political scientists David Cingranelli at

Binghamton University The State University of New York at Binghamton (Binghamton University or SUNY Binghamton) is a public university, public research university in Binghamton metropolitan area, Greater Binghamton, New York, United States. It is one of the four uni ...

, SUNY and David L. Richards at the

University of Connecticut The University of Connecticut (UConn) is a public land-grant research university system with its main campus in Storrs, Connecticut, United States. It was founded in 1881 as the Storrs Agricultural School, named after two benefactors. In 1893, ...

. K. Chad Clay at the

University of Georgia The University of Georgia (UGA or Georgia) is a Public university, public Land-grant university, land-grant research university with its main campus in Athens, Georgia, United States. Chartered in 1785, it is the oldest public university in th ...

joined as third co-director in 2013.

Accessing the data

The CIRI data were free for not-for-profit users. Once registered, CIRI users could create customized datasets, choosing only the indicators, countries, and years they needed; or, they could download the entire data set. As of December 2007, CIRI began using its own numeric country identifier code, but continued to offer others for the purpose of data merging. The MyCIRI feature allowed users to store their datasets on the CIRI server and easily update them when the master CIRI data was updated.

Financial support

Financial support for the CIRI Data Project came from the United States'

National Science Foundation The U.S. National Science Foundation (NSF) is an Independent agencies of the United States government#Examples of independent agencies, independent agency of the Federal government of the United States, United States federal government that su ...

;

The World Bank The World Bank is an international financial institution that provides loans and grants to the governments of low- and middle-income countries for the purposes of economic development. The World Bank is the collective name for the Internati ...

; GTZ;

, SUNY; the Center on Democratic Performance at Binghamton University, SUNY; The Human Rights Institute and College of Liberal Arts & Sciences at The University of Connecticut.

CIRI human rights indicators

The CIRI database coded only human rights PRACTICES of governments. The human rights for which government levels of respect were annually rated by CIRI included: * Assembly & Association * Disappearance * Domestic Movement * Electoral Self-Determination (formerly Political Participation & Free and Fair Elections) * Empowerment Rights Index (An additive index summarizing government respect for electoral

self-determination Self-determination refers to a people's right to form its own political entity, and internal self-determination is the right to representative government with full suffrage. Self-determination is a cardinal principle in modern international la ...

, domestic movement, foreign movement, religion, speech, assembly & association, and workers' rights) *

Extrajudicial killing An extrajudicial killing (also known as an extrajudicial execution or an extralegal killing) is the deliberate killing of a person without the lawful authority granted by a judicial proceeding. It typically refers to government authorities, ...

* Foreign Movement * Independence of the Judiciary * Physical Integrity Rights Index (An additive index summarizing government respect for disappearance, extrajudicial killing, political imprisonment, and torture) * Political Imprisonment * Religion * Speech * Torture * Women's Economic Rights * Women's Political Rights * Women's Social Rights * Workers' Rights Most of the CIRI indicators were ratings (as opposed to rankings) on a scale of 0-2 for their respect of human rights, as follows: *0= Frequent violations of this right *1= Some violations of this right *2= No reported violations of this right The CIRI database used the annual country reports from the US State Department and Amnesty International as its primary sources.

Scores after 2011

The CIRI Human Rights Data Project has not produced scores since 2011. The CIRIGHTS Data Project co-directed by David Cingranelli, Mikhail Filippov and Skip Mark has produced new annual scores using the CIRI coding methodology. The new scores are available from the Binghamton University Human Rights Institute website a
www.binghamton.edu/institutes/hri/researcher-resources.html

website.

References

External links