Although every violation of international human rights law standards is both deplorable and illegal, one of the major advances in the social sciences has been the development of measures of comparative state practice. The oldest of these is the Political Terror Scale (PTS), which provides an ordinal measure of physical integrity violations carried out by governments or those associated with the state. Providing data from the mid-1970s to the present, the PTS scores the human rights practices of more than 190 countries on a scale of 1–5, with 1 representing “best practices” and 5 indicating gross and systematic violations. There are two different sources for these scores: U.S. State Department Country Reports on Human Rights Practices and the Amnesty International Annual Report. Although human rights have traditionally been associated only with the state, individuals can also be denied human rights protection by non-state actors. To measure this, the Societal Violence Scale (SVS) has been created to analyze three sources of physical integrity violations: the individual; corporate or criminal gang activity; and armed groups. As globalization proceeds apace, states have an increased influence on human rights protection in other countries. Unfortunately, human rights data, such as the PTS, analyze only the domestic practices of states. In an effort to better understand the full extent of a state’s human rights performance, the Extraterritorial Obligations (ETO) Report is currently being constructed. The ETO Report will provide an important analysis of state human rights performance when acting outside its own territorial borders.

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