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Human rights index

Central estimate of the extent to which people are free from government torture, political killings, and forced labor, they have property rights, and enjoy the freedoms of movement, religion, expression, and association.

Data source

V-Dem

Last updated
2026-03-17
Next expected update
2027-03-17
Managed by
Pablo Rosado
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  • V-Dem covers many more countries since 1900, which affects regional averages.

  • We provide two kinds of regional averages: country averages and population-weighted averages. Country averages weigh each country equally and give a sense of how the typical country is doing. Population-weighted averages weigh countries with larger populations more and therefore better reflect the average person's experience.

Data sources

V-Dem – Democracy report

The Varieties of Democracy (V-Dem) project publishes data and research on democracy and human rights.

It acknowledges that democracy can be characterized differently and measures electoral, liberal, participatory, deliberative, and egalitarian characterizations of democracy.

The project relies on evaluations by around 3,500 country experts and supplementary work by its researchers to assess political institutions and the protection of rights.

The project is managed by the V-Dem Institute, based at the University of Gothenburg in Sweden.

This snapshot contains all 531 V-Dem indicators and 251 indices + 62 other indicators from other data sources.

For more information, please refer to https://www.v-dem.net/data/the-v-dem-dataset/

Retrieved on
March 17, 2026
Retrieved from
https://v-dem.net/data/the-v-dem-dataset/
Citation
This is the citation of the original data obtained from the source, prior to any processing or adaptation by Our World in Data. 
Coppedge, Michael, John Gerring, Carl Henrik Knutsen, Staffan I. Lindberg, Jan Teorell, David Altman, Fabio Angiolillo, Michael Bernhard, Agnes Cornell, M. Steven Fish, Linnea Fox, Lisa Gastaldi, Haakon Gjerløw, Adam Glynn, Ana Good God, Sandra Grahn, Allen Hicken, Katrin Kinzelbach, Joshua Krusell, Kyle L. Marquardt, Kelly McMann, Valeriya Mechkova, Juraj Medzihorsky, Natalia Natsika, Anja Neundorf, Pamela Paxton, Daniel Pemstein, Johannes von Römer, Brigitte Seim, Rachel Sigman, Svend-Erik Skaaning, Jeffrey Staton, Aksel Sundström, Marcus Tannenberg, Eitan Tzelgov, Yi-ting Wang, Felix Wiebrecht, Tore Wig, Steven Wilson and Daniel Ziblatt. 2026. "V-Dem [Country-Year/Country-Date] Dataset v16" Varieties of Democracy (V-Dem) Project. https://doi.org/10.23696/vdemds26
Pemstein, Daniel, Kyle L. Marquardt, Eitan Tzelgov, Yi-ting Wang, Juraj Medzihorsky, Joshua Krusell, Farhad Miri, and Johannes von Römer. 2026. "The V-Dem Measurement Model: Latent Variable Analysis for Cross-National and Cross-Temporal Expert-Coded Data". V-Dem Working Paper No. 21. 11th edition. University of Gothenburg: Varieties of Democracy Institute.

Citations

How should I cite this data in a news article?

If you have limited space (e.g. in data visualizations), you can use this abbreviated in-line citation:

V-Dem (2026) – processed by Our World in Data

How should I cite this in an academic article or report?

V-Dem (2026) – processed by Our World in Data. “Human rights index – V-Dem” [dataset]. V-Dem, “Democracy report v16” [original data]. Retrieved June 12, 2026 from https://datapage-v2.owid.pages.dev/grapher/human-rights-index-vdem

All data produced by third-party providers and made available by Our World in Data are subject to the license terms from the original providers. Our work would not be possible without the data providers we rely on, so we ask you to always cite them appropriately. This is crucial to allow data providers to continue doing their work, enhancing, maintaining and updating valuable data.

All data, visualizations, and code produced by Our World in Data are completely open access under the Creative Commons BY license. You have the permission to use, distribute, and reproduce these in any medium, provided the source and authors are credited.

Related research and writing

The 'Varieties of Democracy' data: how do researchers measure human rights?

Bastian Herre

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Download the data shown in this chart as a ZIP file containing a CSV file, metadata in JSON format, and a README. The CSV file can be opened in Excel, Google Sheets, and other data analysis tools.

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Data API

Use these URLs to programmatically access this chart's data and configure your requests with the options below. Our documentation provides more information on how to use the API, and you can find a few code examples below.

Data URL (CSV format)
https://datapage-v2.owid.pages.dev/grapher/human-rights-index-vdem.csv?v=1&csvType=full&useColumnShortNames=false
Metadata URL (JSON format)
https://datapage-v2.owid.pages.dev/grapher/human-rights-index-vdem.metadata.json?v=1&csvType=full&useColumnShortNames=false

Code examples

Examples of how to load this data into different data analysis tools.

Excel / Google Sheets
=IMPORTDATA("https://datapage-v2.owid.pages.dev/grapher/human-rights-index-vdem.csv?v=1&csvType=full&useColumnShortNames=false")
Python with Pandas
import pandas as pd
import requests

# Fetch the data.
df = pd.read_csv("https://datapage-v2.owid.pages.dev/grapher/human-rights-index-vdem.csv?v=1&csvType=full&useColumnShortNames=false", storage_options = {'User-Agent': 'Our World In Data data fetch/1.0'})

# Fetch the metadata
metadata = requests.get("https://datapage-v2.owid.pages.dev/grapher/human-rights-index-vdem.metadata.json?v=1&csvType=full&useColumnShortNames=false").json()
R
library(jsonlite)

# Fetch the data
df <- read.csv("https://datapage-v2.owid.pages.dev/grapher/human-rights-index-vdem.csv?v=1&csvType=full&useColumnShortNames=false")

# Fetch the metadata
metadata <- fromJSON("https://datapage-v2.owid.pages.dev/grapher/human-rights-index-vdem.metadata.json?v=1&csvType=full&useColumnShortNames=false")
Stata
import delimited "https://datapage-v2.owid.pages.dev/grapher/human-rights-index-vdem.csv?v=1&csvType=full&useColumnShortNames=false", encoding("utf-8") clear