. Yeppers, sounds just like where I’d want to retire in a few years---------NOT!
Still on the list of the 10 worst violators are the usual suspects. But, since Cuba is still on the list, I want to know from someone who knows, whether this is just politics to mollify China, or if Cuba is really a worse place to be than China.
So, in case I wasn’t clear—
Is China a bigger violator of Human Rights than Cuba? Since I’m clueless, I may not respond much to this thread, but I will read it with much interest.
I don’t think it necessary to determine whether “China a bigger violator of Human Rights than Cuba” (per capita) here. Indeed, I doubt it’s possible.
The construction of a ranking of violators requires assembling of a weighted score of a number of criteria. Rank order in general will be affected by the sensitivity of measurement of each criterion (ie whether they are measured on a five, ten or hundred point scale) and the weighting scheme. Should the weights be constant? That would mean that a country with two slightly bad categories should be ranked the same as one with one pretty bad result. Or should the categories be ranked so that worse departures from the standard are weighted more heavily? It’s not obvious.
But suppose you do go ahead and construct such an index on the basis that it’s better than nothing, properly interpreted. You’ll be able to say that the worst country is worse than a mid-ranking country, but it won’t be sensible to lean much on the order of countries close together because you know that the order is highly sensitive to the way things are measured and how they are aggregated. (This, by the way is the problem that people working on fuzzy indices hope to tackle).
I can’t find a reference to the top ten list at the link provided, and I’m guessing that’s why: the researchers know that those at the top are pretty bad, but not in any meaningful sense so that #9 is worse than #12. That a top ten list is given credence is I expect something about which the researchers who produce the list sigh about.
So it’s quite possible that China dropped off the top ten and it means nothing. As in it has no significance within the ranking exercise and no interference was involved. It’s possible that there has been a change that explains China’s movement - and that it’s meaningful or not meaningful. But it’s also possible that the process got nobbled somewhere along the way. If you could see the weighting scheme for this year and last and note any changes you might be able to tell. Get most of the draft documents and you probably would be able to.
There are going to be a lot of close-ranked countries. The actual rank of a country within that group of bad countries is going to depend quite a lot on the measurement scale and the detail of the aggregating function, neither of which is likely to be compelling even if all measurement is done sincerely.
I think wehen people are talking about the “top ten list”, they’re talking about, in the introduction, the ten countries named after the sentence:
“Countries in which power was concentrated in the hands of unaccountable rulers remained the world’s most systematic human rights violators.”
It then mentions the ten countries referred to in the New York Times, along with brief summaries of human rights violations. China comes after that, prefaced by:
“Some authoritarian countries that are undergoing economic reform have experienced rapid social change but have not undertaken democratic political reform and continue to deny their citizens basic human rights and fundamental freedoms.”