Extending the Human Rights Atlas

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This project is a continuation of the ESRC-funded follow-on project Human Rights Atlas (ES/J000728/1) which has collated data on basic country statistics, legal comitments and human rights practices for all the countries and territories in the world for the period 1981 to 2011 [www.humanrightsatlas.org]. The continuation phase involves updating of the data in the main flat file and actively disseminating the Atlas to a primary user group in Latin America; assisting the user group in using the Atlas to map and analyse human rights issues in Latin America for the period 1990 to 2011; and working with two private organisations - The Mackman Group and the Thomson Reuters Foundation - to continue to raise awareness about the Atlas. The Latin American user group is being coordinated by the Faculty of Social Sciences in Mexico City (FLACSO), which is mapping human rights in the region and identifying gaps in knowledge about human rights using comparative statistical indicators of the kind already collated in the Human Rights Atlas. The work involves a workshop in Mexico City with FLACSO and its network of its researchers. The region itself had undergone remarkable and dramatic political transformations over the period envisaged for this study, including extraction from prolonged periods of authoritarianism, processes of transitional justice, re-establishment and consolidation of democracy, structural adjustment and macro-economic recovery, and rapid economic development among big regional actors such as Mexico, Brazil, Argentina and Chile. The Atlas provides a systematic resource that addresses the main data needs of this research network. The second main part of the project is to work with the Mackman Group (a private sector partner in the original Human Rights Atlas project) and the Thomson Reuters Foundation (the charitable fundation of the global media company Thomson Reuters) to disseminate the Atlas resource and raise awareness about cross-national human rights indicators for a wide range of users, including key organisations from the public and private sectors. This part of the project will take advantage of the Mackman Group's marketing technologies and Thomson Reuters' AlertNet resource, which is dedicated to the humanitarian sector around the world. In addition to the on-line promotional work, the project will also host a large London-based user engagement event hosted by Thomson Reuters in its Canary Wharf facility. This event will feature high profile global leaders from the humanitarian sector to discuss the needs of users for systematic data and data visualisation of the kind carried out by the original Atlas project.