 and welcome to Cooper Union, what's happening with human rights around the world. Today we'll be looking at the state of human rights in the United States, measuring monitoring rights now. What we'll be doing is measuring and monitoring what matters most, because we know what we measure is what matters most. And we're very fortunate to be able to be joined with the Human Rights Measurement Initiative. And school is just starting. So I like to think of it as a report card on human rights for countries around the world. Also by looking at this important data, we can reimagine rights in the United States. We most recently just celebrated World Indigenous People's Day. And I'm very honored to welcome both of our guests, Chad and Keoh to share with us a bit about human rights in the United States. Chad, can you share with us a bit about, and Keoh a bit about World Indigenous People's Day and Indigenous rights. And then I know we'll get into some other aspects on racism and racial justice. Sure, so, you know, at Human Rights Measurement Initiative, we, one of the things we do is we sort of ask human rights advocates in the countries we work in around the world, who's at most risk, right? To experience human rights abuses. And if you look at our data, which is publicly available on rightstracker.org, what you'll see is that one of the groups that's most commonly selected are pretty much, you know, across countries where it's possible to be selected, you know, is Indigenous people. We see Indigenous people consistently, you know, at risk for human rights violations in many countries around the world, including the United States. And so, particularly if you look at the economic and social rights data for the United States, Indigenous peoples are often at high risk to experience limitations on things like the right to food, the right to a job, and right to health and these kinds of rights. Talia, do you have things to add there? Yeah, it's definitely a trend across the world. In every country where we measure this, Indigenous people are right at the top of the list of groups that our human rights experts tell us are experiencing rights violations. And so that's, it features really strongly. And certainly in every settler colonial country that you can, you know, that you would list off the top of your head. But it's, I looked through all the data just yesterday to refresh myself. And Indigenous people show up strongly in Vietnam, in Nepal, in Malaysia. It's a worldwide trend that Indigenous peoples' rights are not being respected. Thank you so much. And we do know though that human rights is really the most important way to really look at quality of life. As you were talking about with economic social, there briefly, Talia, and Wellington and New Zealand is actually, Aotearoa is leading the way with a new sort of well-being measurement as well in budget and other aspects. So it's exciting to see the conversation around human rights being much more broad. Could you share a little bit about well-being and some of those things going on with economic social cultural, economic social, since you started in that way? Yeah, well, I'd like to start by saying, you know, warm greetings from Aotearoa, New Zealand. We certainly have a long way to go here. So I wouldn't hold our settler colonial state up as an example of how to do things. We are, you know, we're having some conversations and there's progress being made, but there's a long way to go. So we, at Hermi, we measure economic and social rights as well as the sort of more classic civil and political rights that some people might think of first when they think of human rights. And we measure them taking into account a country's income. So we know that the international obligation on governments is to do the best with what they have. So, you know, nobody expects a very poor country to have a world-class health system, but every country is obliged to do its best for its people and to keep getting better by devoting the maximum available resources. So we measure how well a country is doing with what they've got and we measure the right to food, health, housing, education, and work, adequate income, all of those things, looking at how well governments are doing at turning their income into rights outcomes. Really good points. And we agree, unfortunately most settler states have so far to go and they're really just beginning to start having the real conversations that we're looking at with reparations and other issues. And that allows us to get back to focusing a little bit on the United States as well. We also know that August 31st will be the 20th anniversary of the World Conference Against Racism. And when we look at civil and political rights in the US, maybe Chad, you could share with us how we're doing and what is some of the information that you found in that important work regarding civil and political rights in the United States of America. Thanks, Josh. Yeah, I mean, just to start with sort of a broad overview of how the United States is doing on civil and political rights, the short answer is quite poorly. If you just sort of limit the comparison to high income democracies, right? And particularly those countries that we have data for the Human Rights Measurement Initiative. US is the worst performer we have in the data set and that subset of countries pretty much across the board on civil and political rights. There just isn't another country like the United States that does this poorly on that subset of rights. And that's not really unique to civil and political rights. I mean, we have a much larger data set for economic and social rights. And even if you look at that subset of countries for economic and social rights, the United States is usually among the worst performers of high income democracies among an economic and social rights. So pretty much across the board on human rights, perhaps unsurprisingly to viewers of your show, right? The United States doesn't do incredibly well on those metrics. Now, if we think about why the United States does so poorly, there are a number of reasons, right? We've already talked about one of them. Poor treatment of indigenous peoples is obviously a centuries long problem in the United States. And I think people tend to relegate that concern to the past. It's obviously still very current and still a crucial issue in the United States. But looking beyond that, racial discrimination and racism are at the fore, right? If you sort of track through our data and once again, look at the people who are selected as the people at risk. One of the things you'll find is if you look across the economic and social rights, people of particular races are often one of the most selected groups. And if you sort of dig into that a little bit more about who those particular people are, our expert respondents that we work with that are human rights practitioners around the United States are often referring to black people, Latinx people, and often sometimes even in this category, they'll once again bring up indigenous people. And that sort of sets this picture of already on economic and social rights, black people, Latinx people are not having the rights respected. So then we maybe wanna look at, well, can they use the political system? Can you use sort of the democratic system to try to get something better, right? To change that maldistribution and those poor economic and social rights practices. But then what we see there is once again, especially people of particular races are often the most selected group as being at risk for not being able to enjoy the rights of political participation are facing violations of the rights to assembly and association, right? Our respondents last year brought up the violent response to many Black Lives Matter protests, right? The backlash against last year's election that we saw and the many sort of voting restrictions that states around the country tried to pass in the aftermath of that election. On the basis of, let's face it, not true allegations of election fraud, but all of the attempts to control this sort of fictional election fraud center around limiting voting rights for people who are often marginalized, often Black people, often Latinx people, often poor people. And so we see that venue for changing things is cut off. And at the same time, these are the very communities that are facing violence on the part of the state at high levels, right? So if you look at our extra judicial killing metric, it's one of the lowest in the world, at least for the data that we collect, certainly the lowest among high income democracies. And once again, people of particular races are the most sort of targeted group there, right? And once again, our respondents tell us they're talking about Black people and Latinx people are the groups that are being targeted by the state for things like extra judicial killing, for torture, for arbitrary arrest, right? And so it's really a picture of a country, right? Where both the economic and social conditions that marginalized people live in are poor and dire. The sort of violence of the state is high towards those groups. And the mechanisms that one would go about changing that either the institutionalized mechanisms via the vote or something like that are cut off and the non institutionalized mechanisms of protest and assembly and association are met with more of that state violence. And so, I don't think that this is new information to anyone, but I do think that people might find it surprising that it comes across so clearly in the data that we have. I think that's probably one of the best aspects of the Human Rights Measurement Initiative is it puts it there. So it has the information, it shows what's going on. And as you brought up last November was when we also had the Universal Periodic Review of the United States when the world examines the US. And it reminded me why what you were sharing that at that time death penalty got a lot of questions. This year on voting got a lot of questions. All those issues came up. And it also was an aspect where you even had really urgent debate taking place at the Human Rights Council looking at systemic racism, police brutality and even a vote at the most recent Human Rights Council saying that the US and the world has to do something about that. So it's probably a trend that you see in the US but also across other countries. And it's really great that you're able to present it that way. And the other side of looking at it is even the sad part is you brought up. Once people did utilize all those civil and political rights to challenge a system that was set against and were able to win by actually electing someone that went along more with the majority of what the people saw as the right direction for the country to move away from that racist past, you now see those trends you pointed out on eliminating those rights to then make it even worse. So it definitely points out what we can do. Is there anything you'd like to add to that as before we move into the economic and social rights a bit more and looking at people at risk as well as empowerment rights and quality of life? I think our data for the United States really highlights that all human rights are connected and that racial injustice is the dominating influence in the human rights landscape in the US. We see that racial groups either ethnic groups or the indigenous people that are selected as the top groups also migrants and refugees and asylum seekers. Those kinds of things are the biggest influence in terms of who is being most affected by rights violations. And I'd also say that we did some extra research on the effect of the pandemic this year and on the effect of the government responses around the world to the pandemic. And our data for the US had all of those same markers where racial injustice affected how people experienced the pandemic. And so when we saw things like the right to housing being affected with evictions, that was along racial lines. When we saw a lack of healthcare, when we saw deaths, those were along racial lines. And when we think about who are the essential workers who are being most affected by being exposed to the pandemic, those follow along racial lines also. And so our commentators and our expert respondents repeatedly said that the negative effects of the pandemic were disproportionately affecting communities of color. And of course, when you look at the response by the government, especially with COVID, I'm sure that even dragged the US even lower and it might have had a small blip going back up with the new administration, but it's also really what you're talking about. Economic social rights, when we don't have healthcare as a human right, when we don't have education as a human right, when we don't have the important issue of housing as a human right, as you pointed out, maybe you can explain a bit more about economic social rights, but also as you were talking about all the human rights being interconnected clearly and then leading over to chat. Yeah, well, as I said, the way that we measure how well countries are doing on economic and social rights, that's the right to food and health and housing, education, adequate income, those kinds of things. We're looking at how well a country is doing compared to how it should be doing, what we calculate it should be achieving. So we look at things like how many kids are in school and how many people have food security, and then we look at how well other countries with the same level of income as the United States are doing on those kinds of things. And what we find is that the United States is doing very badly, that the scores fall into the very bad or bad range for almost everything. For one metric, they just scrape into our fair category. And so that means that there is so much more that the people of the United States could expect to achieve, to expect to enjoy their human rights. And so that means that the government, successive governments, because these scores have been low for as long as we've been measuring them, successive governments are letting the people down. Now, we don't tell our scores, don't tell countries how to achieve these outcomes. So we don't mind if it's done by private market effects or by a social welfare state. We just measure the outcomes. And what we see is that the outcomes are very bad in the United States. So the current way things are going is not serving the people well. That's a really good point. And I like the way you put it in a couple of ways. One is we all know from economic and social rights, it's achieving progressively based on all those aspects you shared. And that's a situation with such a high GDP and one of the largest economies should be doing so much better. And then it really reminds me of states are duty bears. They have that responsibility to their citizens. And by providing this information, Human Rights Measurement Initiative is actually giving us tools to then utilize the other human rights tools of civil and political rights to make sure that our government actually does better and upholds those rights. Chad, would you like to add a little bit to that? Yeah, I mean, I think all that, Ty hit all the big points domestically, I think incredibly well. And that's, I think all very true. I think it's also part of a broader point to be made about the United States participation in the international human rights regime as well. I mean, the United States has ratified so few international human rights treaties. I mean, we ratified the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights, but as you pointed out, we've signed, we haven't ratified the International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights. So deliberately our government doesn't legally consider those rights human rights, right? We haven't ratified the Convention on the Elimination of Discrimination Against Women. I believe one of five countries in the world that hasn't done that at last time I checked are the only country in the world that hasn't ratified the Convention on the Rights of the Child, right? The United States tends to talk a pretty big game on human rights in the international sphere. We talk about being like one of the world's oldest democracies and how rights are at the core of who we are and what we do. And we demand a lot of other countries in terms of their human rights practices. And it's hard for me not to take things a little bit towards the foreign policy angle right now, given that everybody's watching events unfold in Afghanistan right now. And when the United States brings human rights pressure to bear on other countries, it's very easy for other countries to point out the United States' own hypocrisy, right? You saw this when the United States delegation met with China and Alaska earlier this year. And when we bring up questions of genocide in China, questions of human rights abuse in China, questions of crackdowns in Hong Kong, China's immediate response is, well, what about the fact that racial injustice runs rife in the United States? What about the fact that we see protests being met with violent force by United States police officers who are you to tell us what to do, right? And don't get me wrong, I completely recognize the what aboutism in that approach by the Chinese delegation. But the United States' sort of unwillingness to participate fully in this human rights system, not only hamstrings the US's own sort of foreign policy efforts and the things they want to do, but it just makes the entire system weaker, right? It makes it more difficult to promote better lives for people worldwide. And so, you know, when I see things like the fact that the United States hasn't embraced economic and social rights, right? And we haven't said that these things are human rights, that we have an actual debate in the United States about whether or not healthcare is a human right, right? These are things that not only weaken the enjoyment of rights here at home, home for me, right, here in Georgia and the United States, but also everywhere else in the world where the United States would like to sort of encourage better respect for human rights. Our efforts are always gonna be weaker unless we deliver for people here. And I think that's important and it's really getting to domestic and foreign policy being one, you wanna talk about democracy, justice, human rights, you have to understand it's what we do on a daily basis. If we wanna improve those daily conditions, it must be linked for liberation of all peoples. And I thought that was a really good point that you brought up there. The other example, of course, that is raises, especially as we do look at what's going on with Kabul, with Afghanistan and talking about women's rights, it's very difficult to talk about that when you haven't ratified CEDAS you brought up. And the other countries that haven't ratified are the countries that we give aid to from the Pacific to not ratify. And so we really do have to have that deep conversation at home. And I do believe the Human Rights Measurement Initiative is a positive tool to begin that conversation. Because then it's not what you talked about, Chad, if we're bringing it up because we just wanna point out something negative about your country, but we're actually all in it so that everyone's rights around the world are promoted and protected. And the Universal Periodic Review is a good step forward. The problem, of course, is that it's countries reviewing other countries. So of course there's that, it's political. But the Human Rights Measurement Initiative is an exciting, really process to involve people so that everyone can be involved to see how everyone's doing. And I'd like to say by being available to seeing the advocacy and activism of other places, how they've improved. Maybe Tal, you could share with us a bit about Human Rights Measurement Initiative, why it's so unique and how it began and we can continue in that kind. Yeah, we believe that what gets measured gets improved. That leaders like numbers. So government leaders want to know the GDP figures, they want to know how many people are in employment. And at the moment, before we started doing our work, they didn't have numbers on human rights. There's a lot of monitoring and reporting around the world on human rights. A lot of fantastic people doing great work at reporting particular cases, for instance, of people who are experiencing rights violations. But what we discovered that there wasn't was any numbers. Objective measurements where you can track progress, where you can compare countries with each other. And when you can see how much further each country has to go to really make sure that its people are thriving. So what we do is that we use a peer-reviewed and in some cases award-winning methodologies that are accepted both by the academic community as being robust kind of science and also by the practitioner community as reflecting the reality. We use those methodologies to produce numbers that people can present to their leaders. So we want people to be able to say to their leaders, well, look at the scores and the scores are not going up and we want the leaders to call in their advisors and say, well, this doesn't look very good. What do we need to do to get our scores up for next year's round of rights tracker update? And there are lots of clear answers. Everyone in civil society will be able to point to the top five things that need to change in any country. But we want numbers to help drive that prioritization. We want leaders to be, have an extra incentive to care about human rights and about changing how they make policy and make laws and treat people so that their scores will go up. We just want to harness a bit of competitive spirit to kick off a race to the top. So we want to provide useful tools for everybody, for the human rights community, for general citizens who can write to their elected representatives and say, did you notice that our scores are really bad? What are you gonna do to get them up? We want to provide useful tools that will help to drive change. That's a really good example. Also looking at the most recent Olympics where everybody's watching the gold count so much. I love the analysis of looking at the score and especially football starting up in the US and Chad's right there where all the big football teams are and they care a lot about in college as high school and university and pro. Maybe it's a great way of thinking about like US, we love the gold for the Olympics. You care so much about how each city's doing in football each week and who they drafted. It's applying that kind of a discussion to looking at human rights in our country. So maybe Chad, we can look at that or what are some other benefits of HRMI and how it can be a positive tool? Right, so I'll answer that a little bit through my own story with Hermie a bit. So I'm a political science academic here at the University of Georgia. I have been trying to measure human rights through various projects for the better part of 16 years now. And I've been involved in a lot of projects where we've tried to take this on and we've often produced things that were neat and useful especially for people like you and me Joshua. People who are in the academic work on this and trying to understand human rights but a lot of the time those numbers didn't really get traction in the broader world and there's a number of reasons for that. But ultimately, I think it boils down to we weren't producing data that the people who work in this field, the people who think about it on a daily basis weren't producing data that they felt comfortable with that they understood that they could believe in and that they actually thought were produced in a way that was useful to make change, right? And no matter how hard many of us try it's gonna be really difficult to convince every country in the world to set up sort of independent human rights institutions to collect these data for us. So until that day comes where we're really that well off and we have those sort of national human rights institutions that are capable of doing this independent of government everywhere in the world it's largely on those of us in civil society and in academia to figure out a way to produce data to hold states accountable and to do it in such a way that it's not just useful for academics and it's not just useful for people who understand the mechanics of how to produce those data but also useful for everyone, right? I wanna produce data that, you know my family members who've never thought about this stuff before can go to they can quickly understand and they get the point they're quickly able to use that in conversation. And so one of the I think major strengths of Hermi is that everything we do is co-designed. It's not me sitting in a room coming up with a methodology, it's not Susan Randolph our economic and social rights lead, right? Thinking of this stuff for Matt Reigns who runs the civil and political rights thing. All of our methodologies we work on we take to a broader audience of human rights practitioners and journalists and academics and we ask, what do you think about this? And we work together to produce something that we can all agree reflects the reality well actually captures the concept and measures it well and the way academics think about it but also is useful from the perspective of people who are trying to make policies or people who are trying to advocate to governments, right? I can't say enough about how important I think that co-design piece is and to me, you know, as somebody who's worked on a lot of projects that have tried to do something like this in the past that's the thing that really sets Hermi's data apart is that we're producing something that's useful and understandable by everyone and if it's not understandable by you yet then we want you to tell us so we can make it understandable to you and we can actually bring it to you in a way that's usual and can produce change where you are. That's perfect and that really puts it where it's most of our must be useful for directly impacted people whose rights are violated and that's the starting point and of course when we looked at what the US used to do with its human rights report it was good that State Department did collect information of course it had a lot of problems because it's not just independent and I think what's really coming up as we're close to concluding our program as the US is running for the Human Rights Council and there will be one event with the International Service for Human Rights and Amnesty International in September 8th or so when the US was give their pledge and promise I think the Hermi Initiative might be a good tool to add to that to say these are the areas that need to be improvement and it's something that civil society can organize together using that data or then direct action and diplomacy to improve the human rights record in the United States. So as the US runs for the Human Rights Council coming up for one of those coveted 47 seats it's much better as we pointed out to be involved to not allow other countries moving in that would weaken it around the world even more but when any country runs the Hermi information is a great beginning for us all to use as a tool to transform human rights in our country. Of course we don't have a Paris principle institution as a national human rights institution but those are all good things that we can work towards and I thank you both for coming up with this valuable tool and look forward to working together as we go forward to improve human rights record in the United States. And I love the point you said, Talia if you wanted to close out but we measure what matters and looking at it that way. All right, thank you both so much and we look forward to our next show where we'll also look at other countries in the Hermi process looking at the Pacific in the future. Mahalo.