Local Human Rights Monitoring in a Changing Human Rights Context

• In Event: Legal Pluralism

Abstract

Human rights monitors work at both the global and local levels to observe and document state-
sanctioned abuses. In contrast to international NGOs, local NGOs, in general, have broader
access to and greater insight regarding various forms of human rights violations within a country.
Even accounting for any country-specific constraints to the information collection, this insider's
advantage should, theoretically, lead to a more accurate reporting by local NGOs. The purpose of
our project is to identify whether such an advantage indeed exists and, if so, what the potential
implications are for empirical research based on these non-comparable reports. To this end, we
would like to study Turkey's human rights violations between 2000-2020, comparing primary
source documents by international and local non-governmental organizations in terms of the
frequency, scope, and range of abuses. The study aims to explore three main research questions:
(1) How have local and international reporting of violations in Turkey evolved over time? (2)
How do human rights reports vary across organizations and countries? (3) What are the potential
impediments to transparency in reporting? We will answer these research questions with detailed
quantitative data collected from the local human rights monitoring NGOs and using various text
analysis methods to extract information from publicly available resources. We collected the local
data using the daily, monthly, annual bulletins and special reports of the Human Rights
Foundation of Turkey (HRFT) -- one of the largest and civil society-initiated local organizations
documenting human rights violations in Turkey.

Authors

• Roya Talibova, University of Michigan

• Christopher J. Fariss, University of Michigan