Examining the indivisibility of human rights: A statistical analysis

This article tests the claim that human rights are indivisible. If human rights are indeed indivisible then an examination of the relationships between different rights should reveal a strong, bidirectional, and simultaneous link between either all rights (systematic indivisibility) or only some rights (partial indivisibility). To test the components of this claim, descriptive and inferential statistical analyses were used to assess the relationship between eleven human rights. The results of Granger causality tests, the comparison of correlation coefficients, and the comparison of the conditional probabilities of state respect for human rights support the claim that some pairs of rights are indeed indivisible although the same cannot be said for the whole system of rights. In other words, this article finds that human rights are partially indivisible. This finding has important implications for the study and implementation of rights and rights reform.