violations against HRDs it receives either directly or through its partner organisations
at the domestic level and since 1998 has published annual reports containing narrative
accounts of these violations. Again, like the system in Geneva, the Observatory
collects narrative complaints and reports of violations, but does not organise its data
into categories that are tractable for complex and systematic statistical analysis. In
response, this paper draws on a larger research project which has used a variant of the
‘who did what to whom’ framework to code acts of abuse against human rights
defenders that makes possible more systematic statistical analysis.
Part Two: HRD Abuse Data and other Variables
This paper captures the nature and extent of violations against human rights defenders
using more sophisticated analytical techniques than have been used hitherto and then
combines these data with other indicators on democracy, levels of development, intra-
state conflict, overseas aid, post-911 legislation, and discontinuity in time trends. To
that end, this part of the paper first discusses the genesis of the data on acts of abuse
against human rights defenders, examines these data descriptively, and then outlines
the other main variables used in the subsequent bi-variate and multivariate statistical
analysis.
Human rights defender data
The annual reports on abuse against HRDs published by the Observatory for Human
Rights Defenders are narrative accounts that provide details on the victim of the
abuse, the main agent (if known) of the abuse, and other qualifying facts of the
particular case. The information in these narrative accounts comes from a variety of
local sources that form part of transnational networks of partners established by these
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Convention