The United Nations adopted the Universal Declaration of Human Rights in 1948, putting into place a collection of international treaties intended to limit repression and abuse around the globe. In the decades since the declaration’s passage, however, the world has still seen human rights atrocities committed on an immense scale.

The spring of 2014 marks the 20th anniversary of the genocide in Rwanda that left some 800,000 people dead in a matter of months. Trials for those involved in the Cambodian genocide, which resulted in the deaths of more than 20% of the country’s population in the 1970s, remain ongoing. Even in the past few weeks, headlines describing human rights violations from Ukraine and North Korea to the United Arab Emirates and Syria have been prevalent, prompting questions about the whether the global human rights record is improving at all.

In a May 2014 paper published in American Political Science Review, “Respect for Human Rights has Improved Over Time: Modeling the Changing Standard of Accountability,” Christopher J. Fariss of Pennsylvania State University addresses this issue. (An open version of the paper is available on SSRN.) He begins by noting that despite the spread of democracy and greater monitoring of human rights abuses, “current indicators of political repression imply that human rights practices have been essentially constant over the last 35 years.”

To get a more accurate comparison of repression levels than indicated by the current model — known as the “constant standard model” — Fariss develops a “dynamic standard model” that takes into account more current data and the changing standard of what constitutes human rights violations. This in turn allows him to produce revised estimates of repression from 1949 to 2010… MORE