International human rights law promises to protect “everyone.”  Yet, large numbers of people – in developed and developing countries alike – are still denied human rights protection.  State actors are responsible for some of this violence but the role of non-state actors in perpetrating human insecurity is increasingly being understood.  However, what can be said with absolute certainty is that there is no country in the world where citizens enjoy the human rights protection promised to them by law. 

Since 1984, Mark Gibney has directed the Political Terror Scale (PTS) project, which measures levels of physical integrity violations in some 187 countries from 1976 to the present.  Professor Gibney will speak to the importance of measuring political violence and how it has been carried out.  In addition, he will talk about two other human rights indices that are presently being developed.  The first is the Societal Violence Scale (SVS), which measures physical integrity violations by non-state actors.  The second is the Extraterritorial Obligations (ETO) Report, which will measure human rights violations carried out by states beyond their own territorial borders.  

Mark Gibney is Belk Distinguished Professor at the University of North Carolina, and Raoul Wallenberg Visiting Chair of Human Rights and Humanitarian Law at the Raoul Wallenberg institute at Lund University.