Under our founding legislation, the Scottish Commission for Human Rights Act 2006, the Commission has a general duty to promote and encourage best practice for human rights.

An important part of this duty is monitoring how human rights are being experienced in Scotland. Independent monitoring can

• highlight where things are going wrong early so that Governments and Parliaments can step in address or prevent violations of rights
• hold Governments and Parliaments accountable for their actions or failures to act by applying a consistent framework over time and regularly reminding them of their legal obligations
• promote transparency, collaboration and the rule of law, including through making independent conclusions and recommendations

Traditionally, the Commission has done most of its human rights monitoring through our international treaty monitoring work, which involves assessing the impact of specific treaties and reporting our findings to international human rights bodies like the United Nations and the Council of Europe. While this is important and necessary work, these reports are limited by a narrow focus on specific treaties.

As Scotland’s National Human Rights Institution, the Commission is uniquely placed to take a big picture view of human rights, the gaps and progress. State of the Nation reports seek to knit together all the recent data we have on human rights in Scotland from international treaty monitoring work, as well as from our new Spotlight Projects, to provide a bigger and clearer picture of how people are experiencing their rights in Scotland today.

An important priority identified in the Commission’s Strategic Plan 2024-28 which has informed this work is our commitment to hold public bodies to account where human rights are not upheld, and help them to do better.

State of the Nation reports aim to support the Scottish Parliament and other public bodies to understand and meet their obligations under human rights law. At the national level, monitoring is essential to progress recommendations, decisions and judgments from accountability bodies that need to be addressed by the Scottish Government, Parliament and other public sector bodies.

We hope that these reports will also be useful to civil society, human rights defenders and rights holders in Scotland.