Human Rights Rankings Reveal Surprising Over- And Underperformers
The cover of Science and the Study of Human Rights, published by SUNY Press. CREDIT: SUNY Press
Key Takeaways:
- Science and the Study of Human Rights (SUNY Press) uses CIRIGHTS and other indicators to score countries 0–100; authors put the global average near 70 and the United States at 62.5.
- After adjusting for wealth, conflict, and neighbors, they label some states “overachievers” (e.g., Rwanda, the Philippines vs. expected peers) and “underachievers” including China, Egypt, Greece, Israel, Russia, and Iran (scored zero); several countries, including the U.S., were left out of that model for missing data.
- The project leans on U.S. State Department reports that the authors say are now less complete, so the book may be a last comparable snapshot while they try other sources and student coding on labor, prisoners, refugees, and trafficking.
A new book co-written by researchers at Binghamton University and the University of Rhode Island provides a framework for comparing human rights practices around the world and over time, and reveals its overachieving and underachieving nations.
The book, Science and the Study of Human Rights by Binghamton University professors David L. Cingranelli and Mikhail Filippov and University of Rhode Island associate professors Skip Mark and Ashlea Rundlett, also evaluates barriers to improvement and ranks countries of the world on a variety of human rights measures.
“I say this to my classes: If you don’t measure something, the impression is that you don’t care about it,” said SUNY Distinguished Professor of Political Science David Cingranelli, co-director of Binghamton’s Human Rights Institute (HRI). “Once you attach numbers to things, you can do all kinds of research that is considered scientific because it uses quantitative methods that are transparent and replicable.”
The book is part of SUNY Press’ Human Rights series, which is edited by Cingranelli and Binghamton University English Professor Alexandra Moore, HRI co-director. Cingranelli, Mark and Cornell University postdoctoral scholar P. DeAnne Roark are currently working on another book in the series, Forecasting and Preventing Mass Atrocities.
The field of human rights has historically hinged on case studies rather than statistical data. However, improving human rights research, policy analysis, and public understanding requires systematic evidence. In the book, the authors introduce a range of publicly available human rights indicators, with particular attention to the CIRIGHTS Data Project, directed by Cingranelli, Mark and Filippov. The largest dataset of its kind in the world, CIRIGHTS provides numerical scores that show how well every country protects — or doesn’t protect — a wide range of internationally recognized human rights.
On a scale of zero to 100, the average human rights score for governments was just 70, according to their most recent analysis. The United States performed even lower, at 62.5.
In terms of human rights, democracies perform better than non-democracies and rich countries typically outperform poorer ones. Some nations, however, buck the expected trends; the book weighs countries’ structural and historical barriers to human rights and names these over- and under-performers. Some countries couldn’t be included in the achievement assessment because they lacked information on variables used in the models, including the United States, North Korea, Germany, South Sudan, Venezuela, and eight others.
Are Rwanda and the Philippines truly comparable to Denmark and Sweden? Being named an overachiever doesn’t mean that a country is flawless when it comes to protecting civil rights, only that it performs better than expected, according to the rankings.
“In an alternative world, where these countries were wealthier, had less conflict and were surrounded by neighbors who protect human rights, their own human rights would be a lot better, but they’re actually doing far better than anyone could expect them to do,” Cingranelli explained.
On the other side are underachievers, nations that perform below expectations; these include China, Egypt, Greece, Guyana, Israel, Macedonia, Paraguay, Romania, Russia, the Seychelles, Sudan, Tuvalu, and Iran, the last of which scored zero on human rights measures, Cingranelli pointed out.
The book is designed for scholars, graduate students, governments, and intergovernmental and nongovernmental organizations, but will also be of interest to journalists, policymakers, and activists.
“We all have impressions about which countries respect human rights and which do not. The advantage of systematic data is that it forces us to check those impressions against evidence,” Rundlett said. “What I hope readers come away with is a sense that human rights are not just abstract principles. We can study how governments behave and compare them systematically.”
The book is part of SUNY Press’ Human Rights series, which is edited by Cingranelli and Binghamton University English Professor Alexandra Moore, HRI co-director. Cingranelli, Mark and Cornell University postdoctoral scholar P. DeAnne Roark are currently working on another book in the series, Forecasting and Preventing Mass Atrocities.
The field of human rights has historically hinged on case studies rather than statistical data. However, improving human rights research, policy analysis, and public understanding requires systematic evidence. In the book, the authors introduce a range of publicly available human rights indicators, with particular attention to the CIRIGHTS Data Project, directed by Cingranelli, Mark and Filippov. The largest dataset of its kind in the world, CIRIGHTS provides numerical scores that show how well every country protects — or doesn’t protect — a wide range of internationally recognized human rights.
A last, comprehensive look
Undergraduate and graduate students at Binghamton, Rhode Island, and the University of Connecticut have worked on the CIRIGHTS project, and continue to do so; Mark, Cingranelli, and Filippov are all teaching undergraduate courses this year in which students will help assess countries’ human rights practices. Faculty members at University College of London are also participating.
“All the students who take my classes, whether they collect data or are just in the course, learn about the scientific approach and score practices for at least a few countries, to see what the process is like,” Cingarelli said. “I hope it teaches them how science can be used to study things that aren’t obviously quantifiable, like corruption. We can attach numbers to abstract concepts and then study patterns.”
The book, however, may represent a final comprehensive look at available data. The U.S. State Department no longer offers the comprehensive, objective human rights report that forms the core of CIRIGHTS’ findings. Continuing the scoring project may be possible using alternative data sources, but that would create comparability problems with past data.
Political scientists often focus on physical integrity rights, which deal with subjects such as torture, disappearances, imprisonment, and judicial process. Reports issued by the State Department still contain information about those subjects, but it’s currently unknown how politics may have distorted its presentation. Further research may explore this question.
However, the federal reports still contain usable data on issues such as labor rights. Cingranelli will have his students analyze these reports and issue scores. Researchers will also review reports from previous years to fill in gaps and analyze them in new ways.
“We’ve started looking at rights that no one else is measuring. We have projects that measure the rights of prisoners and refugees, and we’ve been doing some work on human trafficking,” Mark added. “There’s still a lot of information in four decades’ worth of reports for rights that we could measure.”
Cingranelli admits that in 40 years of political science research, he didn’t foresee the global trend toward the de-emphasis of human rights in U.S. political discourse. The United States led the world in drafting and adopting the Universal Declaration of Human Rights in 1948. As a result, the UDHR strongly resembles the U.S. Bill of Rights.
“It’s really important to have these measures now because the whole idea of human rights is under attack,” he reflected. “For a while at least, this book will be a last look at what’s going on.”
China: Decade Of Impunity For Crimes Against Uyghurs, HRW Says
File photo of Uyghur detainees listening to speeches in a camp in Lop County, Xinjiang. Photo Credit: Wikipedia Commons
The Chinese government’s decade-long severe repression against Uyghurs and other Turkic Muslims, amounting to crimes against humanity, deserves a stronger response from the international community, Human Rights Watch said.
Ten years after the Chinese Communist Party sharply escalated abuses against Uyghurs in the far western Xinjiang region, the crackdown on rights remains severe. Current evidence shows continued mass arbitrary detention, unjust imprisonment, mass surveillance, cultural and religious erasure, restrictions on travel and communication, and pressure on Uyghurs abroad, even as Chinese authorities promote a public image of normalcy in Xinjiang. State-imposed forced labor in Xinjiang affects the global supply chains, in sectors including automotive, solar panels, apparel, seafood, agricultural products, and critical minerals.
“Rather than ending its crimes against humanity in Xinjiang and bringing justice for hundreds of thousands of Uyghurs whose lives have been destroyed, the Chinese government persists in its atrocities and silences critical voices, even abroad,” said Yalkun Uluyol, China researcher at Human Rights Watch. “The international community’s earlier strong response has fizzled, allowing the Chinese government to shamelessly promote a false sense of normalcy in the region.”
Xi Jinping’s “strike hard campaign against violent terrorism” (严厉打击暴力恐怖活动专项行动) began in Xinjiang in 2014. Repression escalated sharply with the August 29, 2016, appointment of a former Communist Party chief, Chen Quanguo, in Xinjiang. The campaign culminated in the arbitrary detention of an estimated one million Uyghurs in “political education” camps. Chen Quanguo had previously served as party secretary in the Tibet Autonomous Region.
Since then, although some of these camps appear to have closed, hundreds of thousands of Uyghurs and other Turkic Muslims remain in prison, according to available official figures. They include prominent public figures such as Ilham Tohti, Rahile Dawut, Gulshan Abbas, Yalqun Rozi, and Ekpar Asat. Xinjiang appears to have the world’s highest prison detention capacity relative to its population size, according to a May 2026 Financial Times analysis.
More than 140,000 children in southern Xinjiang were separated from their parents between 2017 and 2018, in large part due to arbitrary detention, according to a July 2026 analysis and estimate by an international group, Xinjiang Victims Database. Some children were held in state-run orphanages. The situation for these children remains unclear.
Many Uyghurs living abroad are unable to contact their families—including their children—in China. Authorities maintain severe restrictions and controls on Uyghurs who seek to travel abroad while permitting select Uyghurs in the diaspora to make restricted visits to Xinjiang. Some who returned have said that the authorities pressed them to provide information about activists abroad. Chinese authorities engage in transnational repression to silence Uyghurs living abroad.
Beijing dismisses all calls to end its severe repression in Xinjiang, insisting during top leaders’ official visits to the region that measures to “safeguard social stability” are priorities.
Some governments have taken important steps to respond to these abuses over the past decade. In 2021, the US government enacted the Uyghur Forced Labor Prevention Act, which establishes a presumption that goods made wholly or in part in Xinjiang are linked to forced labor and bars them from being brought into the US. The EU has also enacted an import ban on products produced with forced labor.
In 2021, the US, the European Union, the UK, and Canada imposed targeted sanctions on Chinese officials responsible for abuses in Xinjiang. Other governments, including Muslim-majority states such as Indonesia, the United Arab Emirates, and Pakistan, have shielded Beijing from scrutiny at the UN; and governments including Thailand have deported Uyghurs to China despite the grave risks of torture and other abuses they face upon return. In 2023, in response to such forced returns, Canada committed to resettle 10,000 Uyghur refugees.
On August 31, 2022, the UN Human Rights Office released a landmark report concluding, based on extensive research and analysis, that grave abuses in Xinjiang “may constitute … crimes against humanity.” Beijing dismissed the UN report.
The UN High Commissioner for Human Rights, Volker Türk, acknowledged, in August 2024, that “many problematic laws and policies remain in place” in Xinjiang. In February 2026, he expressed“regret[s]” at China’s “lack of follow-up … on previous recommendations and on accountability.” In June 2026 he similarly expressed concerns over China’s new Law on Promoting Ethnic Unity and Progress, which formalized existing policies to erase minority rights.
His office has not, however, provided substantive public updates on its ongoing monitoring of the region since 2022. Rights groups have been encouraging him to take a firmer line with Beijing and to follow up forcefully and publicly on the recommendations made by his office, given the gravity of their own conclusions, and acknowledgment of the lack of progress.
As Türk enters his second term as high commissioner, with no discernable progress four years after the publication of his office’s landmark Xinjiang report, he should heed the calls of Uyghur victims and their families to take a more robust approach.
Governments should also do more to hold the Chinese government accountable for its ongoing repression in Xinjiang. Countries from all regional and political groups should work together to issue a strong joint statement at the upcoming session of the UN Human Rights Council condemning Chinese government’s crimes against humanity. They should convene a dedicated discussion on the situation in Xinjiang, to follow up on the recommendations of the 2022 report.
More governments, including Canada, Australia, the UK, and Japan, should also adopt legislation prohibiting the imports of goods linked to forced labor, including measures specifically targeting goods from Xinjiang. The EU should ensure that Xinjiang is listed as a high-risk area in its forthcoming forced labor database. Governments should also adopt measures to protect their citizens and residents from Beijing’s acts of transnational repression, Human Rights Watch said.
“Over 10 years of repression in Xinjiang, governments have done far too little to hold the Chinese government accountable for its abuses,” Uluyol said. “Governments should use all tools at their disposal to press Beijing to end its crimes, including by enacting and enforcing forced labor import bans to counter Uyghur forced labor, and imposing targeted sanctions against officials responsible for abuses in Xinjiang.”
