5.2 Linking NHRI Roles and Responsibilities to Development

Quantitative aspects of human development are now well established, including in the Human Development Reports, which make explicit the links between human development and human rights. Indicators, combined with local country targets, provide tools and benchmarks to track when and whether countries are achieving or missing their targets, including the Millennium Development Goals. Indicators of inequality are also quantitative indicators of human rights. They also happen to be the basic measures for the development ranking of nations. NHRIs can use well-being and human development indicators to determine what States need to do to meet peoples’ needs and to know when States are missing their targets. More broadly, the capacity to make the connection between human rights and democratic governance is linked to projects like poverty alleviation, state budgeting and decentralization initiatives. UNCTs are very well placed to help NHRIs access and use these data as a springboard to taking a rights-based approach to development.

These indicators and goals can also be used by NHRIs to assess how well a given country is progressing. MDGs can be used to benchmark, track and assess human rights-based approaches to major governance objectives such as poverty alleviation and other goals affecting populations generally as well as vulnerable groups. This chapter provides specific examples of how to make the connection to democratic governance and development by linking rights to poverty, development, MDG goals and decentralization initiatives.