Human rights and data

In the context of its ongoing work on human rights and the Sustainable Development Goals, the Danish Institute for Human Rights has produced a publication on human rights and data in the context of the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development.

Human rights and data: tools and resources for sustainable development provides a human rights perspective on data, focusing on:

• Ensuring accountability. An assessment of what can realistically be achieved through the generation of statistical data based on global indicators in terms of ensuring accountability for progress towards the SDGs, including for those furthest behind.
• Building a pluralistic ecosystem of data. An identification of approaches, indicators and data that can be used to fill the gaps, including by building on the crucial contributions from existing human rights monitoring mechanisms and National Human Rights Institutions, as well as citizen-generated data.

Human rights are reflected throughout the SDGs and targets. Concretely, 156 of the 169 targets have substantial linkages to human rights and labour standards. The SDGs and human rights are thereby tied together in a mutually reinforcing way. This publication is a contribution to the global dialogue on SDG data, elaborated with the aspiration that data derived from human rights and labour rights mechanisms and processes become a prominent element of such an ecosystem.