The OPERA Framework At the international level, the work of a number of special procedures mandate holders has focused on the development of more detailed indicators on specific rights, following the pioneering work by the former Special Rapporteur on the right of everyone to enjoy the highest attainable standard of physical and mental health, Paul Hunt, who first proposed the structure, process, outcome framework.47 For example, the efforts of the former Special Rapporteur on the Right to Education, Katarina Tomasevski, have fed into the Right to Education Project, an initiative that uses the ‘4A criteria’ to map out, develop and apply a disaggregated list of indicators on the right to education. Other UN agencies and civil society organizations have similarly developed lists of sector-specific indicators, for example on the rights to food,48 housing,49 and water.50 The deliberations underway on what should replace the current Millennium Development Goals (MDG) and targets beyond 2015 have prompted renewed efforts to devise rights-based indicators and metrics of progress in relation to poverty, inequality, social protection and other ESC rights. For example, the former Independent Expert and current Special Rapporteur on access to safe drinking water and sanitation, Catarina de Albuquerque, has engaged in inter-agency efforts to employ human rights indicators to better track progress on the rights to water and sanitation and to address the gaps in the MDG framework, with a view to incorporating these indicators in the development agenda post-2015.51 Benchmarks On their own, indicators are inconclusive. They say nothing without clear reference points against which to judge performance and assess the adequacy of achievements or progress over time. A simple way to identify benchmarks and reference points, used by CESR in its country fact sheets, is to compare a country’s performance to other countries that have similarities, for example in terms of level of development or geographic proximity.52 However, within the UN context, some concern has been expressed that using country comparisons may be ‘politically explosive’.53 Other more politically acceptable benchmarks come from internationally agreed development commitments, the most well-known being the MDGs, which set specific goals and targets to be achieved by 2015 in a range of areas closely connected to economic and social rights such as the rights to health, education, food, water and sanitation. The Committee on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights has frequently requested states to set their own benchmarks in its general comments and concluding observations. More recently, one member of the Committee, Eibe Riedel, has advocated for formalizing the use of indicators and benchmarks in the Committee’s reporting process through a four-step procedure that adopts the acronym ‘IBSA’ (Indicators, Benchmarks, Scoping and Assessment).54 Through the IBSA process, indicators and benchmarks are selected through a ‘scoping’ exercise carried out in the context of the state’s periodic report. This is done with input from civil society and specialized UN agencies to ensure benchmarks are realistic, but sufficiently ambitious in the context of the particular state’s level of capacity. The Committee would refer to the state’s performance against these benchmarks when making its subsequent ‘assessments’ of a state’s periodic reports. However, the content of this assessment step is yet to be comprehensively articulated. As discussed further in the next section, how to interpret numbers in the context of assessing a state’s compliance may be a complicated question; failure to meet a non-binding benchmark is not in itself tantamount to non-compliance with the Covenant. Sakiko Fukuda-Parr, Terra Lawson-Remer and Susan Randolph have argued that the reference points commonly used in human rights monitoring do not sufficiently link the performance expected of a state to its level of development. In response to this, they propose a more technical method that 8