In October, Mark Wielga contributed to a forum at the Cumberland Lodge on Human Rights Indicators. Representatives from academia, NGOs, consulting firms, and corporations working in business and human rights gathered in this remarkable setting. The goal was to develop foundational concepts to apply to proposed human rights indicators, which would be used to rate and rank corporate action.

Mark was selected as an expert advisor focused on human rights and private security companies. The learnings of NomoGaia’s fieldwork and analysis urge caution: human rights indicators are very difficult to develop. For most rights issues, a level of transparency and a track record of consistent data gathering is needed to measure impacts reliably. Private security forces publish very minimal data about their impacts.

We received special support for this effort, so no donor contributions were used to send Mark out to the UK.