political and economic? The third point to consider when developing a strategy for
empirical testing is how human rights should be measured according to the country where
the abuses are taking place. Should human rights violations be viewed differently if they
occur in a country that is experiencing a war? How should those human rights violations
be measured?
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McNitt continues with his steps for designing a strategy for measuring human
rights data that can be empirically tested and believes that the analyst must distinguish
between individual and group rights as the fourth step of the process. A decision should
be made as to include or exclude the application of human rights to entire groups. Next,
McNitt suggests focusing upon a small set of core rights. The reason for this suggestion
is because McNitt feels that the core set of human rights (such as freedom from torture) is
more universally accepted. The author cautions that “…to often authors have used
summated scales without analyzing the interrelationship between items” he suggests that
in order to empirically test human rights data in a useful manner one should “…begin by
either by examining individual practices or if scaling is desirable to use such scaling
techniques as factor analysis or Gutman scaling to establish unidimensionality before
employing summated measures.”
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Human rights are conceptual but most agree that these rights include civil rights,
political rights, economic rights, social rights, cultural rights, environmental rights, and
developmental rights.
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Human rights according to a widely used, free dictionary that is
available worldwide on the internet are rights that “refer to the concept of human beings
as having universal rights, or status, regardless of legal jurisdiction or other localizing
factors, such as ethnicity and nationality.”
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Providing clear definitions of the
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Convention