Human Rights
Human rights are rights that all people have, regardless of their country, gender, sexuality, ethnicity, or any other trait.
Among others, this includes: physical integrity rights, such as not being killed or tortured; civil rights, such as practicing their religion and moving freely in their country; and political rights, such as freedoms of speech and association.
The protection of these rights allows people to live the lives they want and to thrive in them.
Human rights have become much more protected, but this varies a lot between countries. And not everyone enjoys the same protections: people are often marginalized because of their gender, sexuality, or ethnicity.
On this page, you can find data, visualizations, and writing on how the protection of human rights has changed over time, how it differs across countries, and how it varies between people of different genders, sexualities, and ethnicities.We have additional topic pages related to people’s economic and social rights, such as on food, health, and education.
Endnotes
This means that populous countries matter more when calculating the average than countries with small populations.
Coppedge, Michael, John Gerring, Carl Henrik Knutsen, Staffan I. Lindberg, Jan Teorell, David Altman, Michael Bernhard, Agnes Cornell, M. Steven Fish, Lisa Gastaldi, Haakon Gjerløw, Adam Glynn, Ana Good God, Sandra Grahn, Allen Hicken, Katrin Kinzelbach, Joshua Krusell, Kyle L. Marquardt, Kelly McMann, Valeriya Mechkova, Juraj Medzihorsky, Natalia Natsika, Anja Neundorf, Pamela Paxton, Daniel Pemstein, Josefine Pernes, Oskar Rydén, Johannes von Römer, Brigitte Seim, Rachel Sigman, Svend-Erik Skaaning, Jeffrey Staton, Aksel Sundström, Eitan Tzelgov, Yi-ting Wang, Tore Wig, Steven Wilson and Daniel Ziblatt. 2023. V-Dem [Country-Year/Country-Date] Dataset v13. Varieties of Democracy (V-Dem) Project.
The score jumps in 1900 because V-Dem covers many more countries since then (which often were colonies at first).
Velasco, Kristopher. 2020. Transnational Backlash and the Deinstitutionalization of Liberal Norms: LGBT+ Rights in a Contested World.
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Our articles and data visualizations rely on work from many different people and organizations. When citing this topic page, please also cite the underlying data sources. This topic page can be cited as:
Bastian Herre, Pablo Arriagada and Max Roser (2016) - "Human Rights". Published online at OurWorldInData.org. Retrieved from: 'https://staging-owid.netlify.app/human-rights' [Online Resource]
BibTeX citation
@article{owid-human-rights,
author = {Bastian Herre and Pablo Arriagada and Max Roser},
title = {Human Rights},
journal = {Our World in Data},
year = {2016},
note = {https://staging-owid.netlify.app/human-rights}
}
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