'Firming Up Soft Law: The Impact of Indicators on Transnational Human Rights Legal Orders'

The human rights legal order is famously lacking in clear sanctioning power, yet it exerts considerable soft power in a wide variety of ways. The use of indicators—quantitative measures of performance—tends to harden soft law in transnational contexts.  In the human rights legal order, recourse to indicators helps to define legal obligations more clearly and to specify the terms of compliance. Thus, they serve to harden human rights law.  However, the turn to indicators is contested in the human rights field. There are objections to the way they package information in simple, commensurable forms that tend to strip it of context, history, and embeddedness in particular social structures and systems of cultural meaning. In this lecture, I explore how the turn to indicators affects the way human rights are conceived and function in transnational contexts. Using the example of an OHCHR project to develop indicators for human rights and the US State Department’s Trafficking in Persons Report (TIPS Report), I show how information is gathered and promoted in a way that supports and legitimates a set of normative standards.