We have released the PTS Scores based on the most recent human rights reports from Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch and the U.S. State Department. The newly released scores cover human rights conditions in countries and territories for the year 2021.
This year’s release includes:
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155 PTS scores based on the 2021 Amnesty International Report 2020/21: The State of the World’s Human Rights.
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104 PTS scores based on the 2021 Human Rights Watch World Report 2020.
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196 PTS scores based on the 2021 U.S. State Department Country Reports on Human Rights Practices.
All data, as well as the latest version of the codebook PTS-Codebook can be accessed here: Download
Last year’s version as well as older data releases of the PTS will still be available in various formats (i.e., .xlsx, .dta, .RData, and .csv) in our Data-Archive
The Data Table on the website and the PTS-App have been updated and also contain the latest scores.
Notes:
This year we received a number of inquiries about how we code human rights conditions in conflict zones and specifically how the war between Russia and the Ukraine is treated by coders. To answer this question, I want to refer the user to our PTS-Codebook. PTS coders are instructed to code physical integrity rights violations perpetrated by state actors within the “state” of interest’s territorial boundaries. As such, physical integrity rights violations perpetrated by Russian forces inside of the Ukraine are not coded. They appear neither in Ukraine’s PTS-score nor in Russia’s. Ukraine’s PTS-score only accounts for violations perpetrated by Ukrainian state actors inside of Ukraine. Similarly, Russia’s PTS-score only captures violations perpetrated by Russian state actors inside of Russia. Russian perpetrated violations in the Ukraine or Syria are not coded just like U.S. perpetrated violations in Iraq or Afghanistan are not coded by the PTS. We also do not code human rights violations in Eastern Ukraine by Russian sponsored separatists, as we do not deem them to be state actors. Matters become a bit more tricky when coding the U.S. State Department’s report for Crimea. Crimea, not unlike Western Sahara, Palestine, Puerto Rico, or Taiwan is treated as an entity whose statehood or status is contested by some UN member states. However, every year the U.S. State Department, Amnesty International, and Human Rights Watch publish reports for some of these territories or entities and we do ask coders to assign PTS scores to these reports. For cases such as these, we ask coders to determine who should count as the de-facto state actor and to code violations accordingly. In the case of Russian occupied Crimea, we treat Russian authorities operating inside of Crimea as the state actor and Crimea’s PTS score as such accounts only for violations perpetrated by Russian authorities in Crimea. Importantly, violations perpetrated by Russian authorities in Crimea are not taken into account to assign the PTS-score for Russia.