Since the inception of the Political Terror Scale, the annual Amnesty International Report has served as one of our two sources of data, the other being the annual State Department Report. In that way the PTS has made use of data from both a non-state (AI) source and a state (SD) human rights report. Unfortunately, and for reasons that have never been made clear, at least publicly, AI did not publish an annual report in year 2014. One thing to be noted about the AI report is that the title refers to the year of publication, although the events being reported on occur the year before. Thus, there was no 2014 annual report, which would have analyzed events in 2013.
Our great fear was that Amnesty International had decided to cease publishing an annual report and in order to gain the perspective of a non-state actor we coded the Human Rights Watch annual report for events occurring in 2013. We have posted those on this site but have not sought to substitute these scores for the missing – or what appeared to be missing – AI scores.
Much to our surprise and delight, in June 2015 Amnesty International published a joint 2014/2015 report, which analyzes events from 2013 and 2014, although there is a decided emphasis on the more recent year. We have posted these scores under 2014 and decided to leave 2013 blank on the basis that there simply is not enough information about 2013 to warrant a separate category. However, we sincerely hope that this was a momentary blip and that the annual Amnesty International reports will continue to be published and to serve as a vital source of information on states’ human rights practices.