The feasibility and relevance of measuring human rights, democracy and governance have long been controversial both in the human rights community and in the international statistical family. Within the human rights community, the term “indicator” has had two distinct - and somewhat contrasting - meanings: while for some it designated, in the strict statistical sense, quantitative synthetic information based on robust data (Türk, 1990; Alston, 1998), for many others it designated a qualitative synthetic overview based on extensive sets of questions or “checklists” related to key human rights dimensions (Green, 2001). The latter meaning has deeply marked the approach to human rights assessments that has prevailed within the UN system and among most human rights leading experts during the last decades.