The CIRI Human Rights Data Project:

The Cingranelli-Richards (CIRI) Human Rights Dataset contains standards-based quantitative information on government respect for 15 internationally recognized human rights for 195 countries, annually from 1981-2007. It is designed for use by scholars and students who seek to test theories about the causes and consequences of human rights violations, as well as policy makers and analysts who seek to estimate the human rights effects of a wide variety of institutional changes and public policies including democratization, economic aid, military aid, structural adjustment, and humanitarian intervention.

It is IMPORTANT that you click HERE to read the details of recent dataset changes.

The CIRI Human Rights Dataset:

• Contains measures of government human rights practices.
• Contains both disaggregated measures of specific human rights practices, which can either be analyzed separately or combined into valid and reliable indices, as well as two already-aggregated indices.
• Describes a wide variety of government human rights practices (15) including torture, workers' rights, and women’s rights over a 26-year period.
• Is replicable. The detailed coding manual allows anyone to reapply our detailed coding rules to cases included in the dataset.
• Is reliable. At least two trained coders evaluated each variable for each country year. Reliability scores are available for each variable.
• Allows users to save their customized datasets on their MyCIRI page for easy updating when the master CIRI dataset is updated.