Democratic Audit is a non-governmental organisation, attached to the Human Rights Centre, University of Essex. It draws upon a wide range of collaborators from the University of Essex, other universities, newspapers, law firms and elsewhere.
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The Audit was originally set up in 1991 by the Joseph Rowntree Charitable Trust through two partners - Charter88 and the Human Rights Centre. The idea was to produce high-profile and policy-relevant studies of democratic and human rights issues to the Centre's academic standards. Democratic Audit published its founding statement in December 1992.
British Democracy
The Audit has published three major democratic audits of the UK and a wide variety of reports on elections, quangos and other democratic issues in the UK. The most recent is a major democratic audit of British, Democracy under Blair (Beetham et al, Politico's, second edition, 2003), which employs the Audit's full international framework for assessing democracy.
This volume follows up two previous audits of the UK up to 1997 - The Three Pillars of Liberty (Klug et al, Routledge, 1996) on political freedom in the UK, and Political Power and Democratic Control (Weir and Beetham, Routledge 1999), on the UK's democratic arrangements.
Auditing Democracy
The Audit's pioneering work on democratic auditing has been developed through the inter-governmental body, International IDEA (Institute for Democracy and Electoral Assistance), Stockholm, so that citizens of any country in the world can assess the quality of their democracy and human rights as a basis for improvement
The democracy assessment framework has also been adapted for the UK Department for International Development to build democratic arrangements and human rights - including economic and social rights - in development programmes aimed at providing pro-poor services and empowering marginalised communities.
An audit team, drawn from Democratic Audit and the Centre for Democratisation Studies, University of Leeds, has drawn up a full guide to democracy assessment, The IDEA Handbook on Democracy Assessment, and a comparative report on pilot assessments in eight countries, The State of Democracy. The Handbook and report were published in 2002 by International IDEA and Kluwer Law International and are available from www.brill.nl, or brill@turpinltd.com.
Democratic Audit offers partnerships in assessment work in the UK and globally. We undertake consultancies, "desk audits" and other research for partners, and facilitation, education and training work. We are currently seeking funding to research and publish a comprehensive study of international standards for democracy and human rights and examples of best practice from around the world.
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