2026 PTS Release

 

We released the PTS Scores based on the most recent human rights reports from Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch. Because the U.S. State Department did not release their Country Reports on Human Rights Practices as of this release, our release does not include PTS_S scores for 2025. The newly released scores (PTS_A and PTS_H) cover human rights conditions in countries and territories for the calendar year 2025. A visual of temporal trends of the average PTS-scores is shown in Figure 1. Table 1 reports the breakdowns of reports by the level of political terror (PTS-score).



Figure 1: Annual Average Human Rights Scores
Figure 1: Shown are annual averages and 95% confidence intervals for PTS_A (based on Amnesty International's reports), PTS_H (based on Human Rights Watch reports), and PTS_S (based on the U.S. State Department reports).


Table 1: 2026 Human Rights Reports by PTS-Level
Scale Level 1 Level 2 Level 3 Level 4 Level 5 Reports
PTS_A (Amnesty International) 32 (21.8%) 34 (23.1%) 45 (30.6%) 21 (14.3%) 15 (10.2%) 147
PTS_H (Human Rights Watch) 7 (6.7%) 21 (20.2%) 38 (36.5%) 27 (26.0%) 11 (10.6%) 104
PTS_S (U.S. State Department) 0 (NA) 0 (NA) 0 (NA) 0 (NA) 0 (NA) 0
Table 1: Shown are the number of reports coded (percentages in parentheses) by PTS-Score.



This year’s release includes:


All data, as well as the latest version of the codebook PTS-Codebook can be accessed here: Download

Last year’s version as well as older data releases of the PTS will still be available in various formats (i.e., .xlsx, .dta, .RData, and .csv) in our Data-Archive

The Data Table on the website and the PTS-App have been updated and also contain the latest scores.