Why Use Human Rights Impact Assessment?

HRIAs serve many purposes. The main ones are: ensuring compliance with human rights, integrating human rights into policy making, improving accountability, and facilitating empowerment.

1. Compliance

HRIAs ensure compliance with human rights. They identify policies infringing human rights with a view to preventing states from acting in breach of their human right obligations. In particular, human rights compliance evaluation has been used for draft legislation. It is used to examine the likely impact of the legislation on the enjoyment of human rights, and to guarantee its conformity with human rights treaties.

Several states already practice this kind of impact assessment. In many of these cases, the proofing of draft legislation is the task of national human rights institutions and parliamentary committees specialised in human rights.

2. Policy making

HRIAs integrate human rights into policy making. They predict the likely consequences of future policies on the human rights situation of a state, which helps policy makers determine the actions that must be taken to implement human rights, and they encourage states to address human rights issues proactively.

HRIAs therefore provide two advantages for policy making. Firstly, they improve the quality of policies, as they require a clear formulation of the objectives of a policy and a thorough examination of the means to achieve these objectives. They stimulate this by in-depth reflection. Secondly, HRIAs facilitate the mainstreaming of human rights. Mainstreaming aims to raise awareness of human rights among policy makers, which enhances collaboration between them and ensures that human rights are consistently applied.

3. Accountability

HRIAs improve accountability. They assess whether duty-bearers meet their human rights obligations. They identify  the responsibilities of the duty-bearers and oblige them to bear the cost of action prejudicial to human rights. HRIAs thus make room for accountability mechanisms, whereby individuals can obtain redress for the violation of their rights. They aim to inform about the potential impact of duty-bearers' policies, and by so doing they enhance transparency in public decision making. They also give individuals the chance to express their concerns and they encourage decision makers to consider these concerns seriously. This makes duty-bearers directly accountable to the population.

4. Empowerment

HRIAs facilitate empowerment. Empowerment considers individuals as right-holders rather than instruction-receivers, and this can be achieved by enhancing participation. Participation strengthens democracy because it allows citizens to be directly involved in government. It also enables them to contribute to their own development. Participation results in individuals feeling they have more ownership of decisions. Because of its virtues, participation is not only a means but also an end in undertaking HRIAs. It must therefore be secured throughout the whole policy-making process.