Since the early 80’s a group of scientists at Purdue University in Indiana, U.S.A. and members of PIOOM (the Dutch abbreviation for “lnterdisciplinary Program of Research on Root Causes of Human Rights Violations”) at the University of Leiden in the Netherlands, have evaluated annually the performance of the states of the world in their respect for political human rights. In Germany, these data were used, for example in the biannual book “Global Trends”, but there were no efforts made to process the data here. As the coding process for such rankings requires much time, the measurement results were sometimes published quite late and no actual data were available. During the winter semester 1994/95 a group of students in my seminar on methodologies of measuring human rights violations was interested in measuring international human rights. For the first time the “Country Reports on Human Rights Practices for 1994” of the U.S. State Department was on Internet. Thus the data source necessary for the coding was available in early 1995. The students coded with great enthusiasm the human rights situation of 193 states. I also would like to thank Hilary Landorf, New York University, for her assistance translating this article and for critical comments. This INEF-Report documents the research process and also the results or the measurement. Hopefully the measurement of human rights violations will continue in Duisburg on a yearly basis. Cooperation with the scientists at Purdue and Leiden could improve the reliability of these internationally used data.