Monitoring the obligation to fulfill human rights
Negative Obligations
Classic human rights monitoring methodologies have tended to focus on documenting and recording specific events that amount to violations of the human rights of specific individuals. This type of monitoring usually relies on collecting event-based data after a violation has occurred.
These classic methodologies are well suited to monitoring violations of negative obligations - particularly the obligation to respect and the obligation to protect (violations by third parties).
Positive Obligations
However human rights also entail positive obligations to improve the realization of human rights - the obligation to 'fulfill'. This moves beyond the 'do no harm' obligations to emphasizing the responsibility of the state to also 'do good' in the sense that it should take steps, including through policies and programmes, to ensure the progressive realization of human rights. However, the classic event-based monitoring methodologies are not well suited to monitoring of public policies, nor with evaluating state compliance with human rights obligations such as 'progressive realization'.
Monitoring and assessing government poverty reduction policies from a human rights perspective therefore requires moving beyond these classic human rights monitoring methodologies. This has become particularly clear in the case of economic and social rights and the need to monitor and assess government compliance with the specific standards required by these rights, such as 'progressive realization' or 'maximum available resources'. Monitoring and assessing compliance with these standards requires collecting not only qualitative, but also quantitative data, over time in order to measure achievements in relation to defined targets and commitments over a defined period of time.
Developing new methodologies for human rights assessment has therefore required learning from other disciplines - drawing in particular from the social sciences and development practice - adapting and adjusting tools, indicators and methodologies that already exist in development practice for human rights purposes.
Mapping of Methodologies
The methodologies and tools mapped here are chosen specifically because they move towards developing this type of ongoing monitoring of public policies from a human rights perspective, and some of them show how to build a case where governments (or other duty-bearers) are failing to meet their human rights obligations. Although the tools all have similar objectives, each tool offers a distinct perspective. For example, while some tools try to measure progressive realization of human rights once progress has been made (ex-post analysis), some of the tools in the human rights toolkit focus on an ex-ante analysis that try to predict in advance any possible negative effects of public policies, as a way to prevent regression in that realization before those policies are even implemented.