Evren Tanson

Human rights institutions formally recognize individuals as rights-bearing subjects, yet many experienced harms never become rights violations within institutional systems. Existing scholarship commonly explains such failures in terms of enforcement weakness, epistemic injustice, or accountability gaps. This article identifies a prior and under-theorized stage: institutional harm attribution. It introduces the concept of the Harm Attribution Gap (HAG) to describe situations in which institutional classification structures render rights-based interpretation procedurally irrelevant before responsibility is assessed. Drawing on recognition theory and institutional sociology, the analysis argues that recognition is not solely a moral or status-based phenomenon but also a classificatory process embedded within administrative rationality. Institutional processing unfolds sequentially through intake framing, classification, evidentiary structuring, threshold application, and recording, each stage narrowing evaluative scope. Although such narrowing is functionally necessary for institutional stability and predictability, it can cumulatively filter certain harms out of violation-assessing pathways. The resulting gap does not arise from disbelief or intentional suppression but from structural design. By distinguishing harm attribution gaps from epistemic injustice and responsibility gaps, the article clarifies the upstream mechanisms through which systematic non-attribution occurs. It concludes by specifying the conditions under which attribution architectures are most likely to generate persistent rights-blindness and outlines implications for institutional analysis.

Human rights systems are often evaluated through their capacity to investigate violations, assign responsibility, and deliver remedy. Yet many harms persist without reaching those downstream stages. This article introduces Harm Attribution Gaps (HAGs) as an analytical framework for situations in which harm is real and consequential but fails to become institutionally actionable because it cannot be attributed to an authorised category of violation. Harm attribution gaps identify a distinct institutional failure mode in which harm is filtered out prior to adjudication, not through denial or disbelief, but through routine classificatory translation. Rather than locating failure primarily in enforcement deficits or political resistance, the framework shifts attention upstream to the classificatory and procedural mechanisms through which institutions decide what counts as harm in the first place. The article specifies conceptual boundaries to prevent over-expansion, develops a six-part diagnostic typology, and maps how attribution gaps form across institutional stages including intake, classification, evidentiary evaluation, and threshold-setting. A worked illustration shows how harm can be acknowledged as distress while remaining non-actionable through ordinary procedures. The conclusion identifies trade-offs involved in expanding recognition and outlines a For Peer Review Only research agenda for testing and applying the framework across human rights domains.

Traditional human-rights systems assume that all forms of harm can be recognized within fixed legal categories such as violence, discrimination, or deprivation. Yet many twenty-first-century harms arise not through overt aggression but through institutional processes, digital infrastructures, and bureaucratic mechanisms that function procedurally while producing real suffering. This paper introduces the Human Rights+ (HR+) Framework, a model designed to identify and address such Invisible Harm. The framework integrates three interrelated constructs—Invisible Harm, Harm Attribution Gaps (HAGs), and Institutional Harm—which together explain how harm persists when recognition fails. Drawing on theories of structural violence (Galtung, 1969), epistemic injustice (Fricker, 2007), institutional betrayal (Freyd, 2013), and the capabilities approach (Sen, 1999), and digital ethics (Floridi, 2018; Benedek, 2021). HR+ redefines the boundaries of recognition within contemporary rights systems. It culminates in the principle of Perceptual Justice—the capacity of institutions to perceive and respond to harm before it becomes normalized, reframing recognition itself as a rights function. The HR+ Framework extends human rights beyond static categories, offering tools to govern systemic and algorithmic forms of harm.

Foundational frameworks are often judged by the solutions they immediately produce. Yet their primary value lies elsewhere: in changing what institutions are able to see, name, and respond to. The Human Rights+ Framework was developed to address a specific failure in contemporary governance — the persistence of harm that remains invisible not because it is unknowable, but because existing systems lack the conceptual tools to recognise it in time. This essay reflects on what would change if that framework were applied differently in practice. Rather than proposing new interventions or operational fixes, it explores how recalibrating judgement — particularly around timing, ethics, and insider knowledge — could plausibly lessen harm in contexts of digital exploitation and coerced cyber-fraud.

This monograph introduces the Human Rights+ (HR+) framework, an expanded theoretical model for understanding how modern institutions fail to recognize and respond to certain forms of harm. The work proposes that many contemporary injustices are not defined by physical violence or overt discrimination, but by invisibility: harm that exists yet is not acknowledged within the categorical limits of human rights, law, and policy. The framework identifies three interrelated constructs—Invisible Harm, Harm Attribution Gaps (HAGs), and Institutional Harm—and unites them through the principle of Perceptual Justice, defined as the moral and procedural capacity of institutions to see, attribute, and act upon harm before it becomes normalized. Drawing from the theoretical traditions of Galtung’s structural violence, Sen’s capabilities approach, and Freyd’s institutional betrayal theory, HR+ develops a language for diagnosing systemic failures of recognition in both bureaucratic and digital systems. Through conceptual synthesis and qualitative analysis, the monograph argues that the moral legitimacy of modern institutions depends not only on what rights they protect, but on their perceptual ability to recognize emergent harms.

This paper establishes Harm Attribution Gap as the core mechanism for understanding why modern cyber enabled harms persist without remedy. It argues that the label cybercrime has become too exhaustive to function as a working category. When hacking, scams, coercion, and fraud labor are collapsed into one umbrella, institutions and observers misclassify harm, demand the wrong evidence, and delay response. Harm Attribution Gap theory explains the result: harm is real and accumulating, yet interpretive and procedural systems fail to classify it as a recognized harm category, producing non recognition and non remedy. This paper proposes a recognition first approach to categorization. It offers a minimal separation between hacking and cyberfraud and maps the predictable failure points where category collapse becomes institutional delay. The taxonomy is not exhaustive. Its purpose is clarity and recognition, not completeness.

Existing human rights models were designed for an era of visible violence and identifiable perpetrators. In the twenty-first century, harm increasingly occurs through digital, bureaucratic, and institutional systems that diffuse responsibility. This paper introduces the Human Rights+ Framework, an expanded model integrating three interdependent concepts: Invisible Harm (injury escaping recognition due to technological mediation or stigma), Harm Attribution Gaps (diffusion of responsibility for harm across complex systems), and Institutional Harm (damage generated by systems failing to act on known injustices). Drawing on autoethnographic experience within coerced cyber-labour networks and comparative institutional analysis, the study demonstrates how structural, digital, and procedural opacity sustain impunity. Building on Galtung’s structural violence and Sen’s capability approach, the framework reconceptualizes rights as protections against all preventable constraints on human flourishing—including those enacted by algorithms and institutions. The paper concludes with policy mechanisms for narrowing harm-attribution gaps and establishing anticipatory accountability in AI and governance.

This paper applies the Human Rights+ framework through a reflexive single-case design, examining how institutional processes in a high-income country can produce invisible displacement through structural recognition failure. Building on Harm Attribution Gap (HAG) Theory, it explores how bureaucratic and administrative systems can perpetuate harm while maintaining an appearance of procedural legitimacy. Using reflexive qualitative analysis, the study identifies mechanisms of institutional attrition, where individuals are gradually displaced not by physical force but by systemic exclusion, epistemic invalidation, and administrative inertia. The findings reveal that institutional harm emerges when accountability systems prioritize formal compliance over perceptual justice, leaving significant forms of harm socially unrecognized. This paper contributes to the growing conceptual foundation of Human Rights+ by empirically demonstrating how Harm Attribution Gaps function within advanced institutional contexts, and by outlining pathways toward recognition, accountability, and preventive governance.

Human rights institutions were designed for visible violence and identifiable perpetrators, yet contemporary harm often arises through lawful systems such as data infrastructures, bureaucratic design, and digital governance. Human Rights+: Closing Invisible Harm concludes the diagnostic phase of the HR+ framework by asking how recognition failures can be closed before they normalize. Building on the concepts of invisible harm and harm-attribution gaps, this study proposes perceptual and procedural strategies that enable institutions to detect and repair unacknowledged suffering. Through qualitative synthesis and reflexive case observation, it introduces three closure mechanisms—recognition audits, ethical proportionality, and contextual listening—as practical tools for what HR+ terms perceptual justice. The goal is to evolve human-rights work from static protection to adaptive recognition, bridging moral philosophy and institutional reform. Extending the insights of Series I (Recognition Failure) and Series II (Harm Attribution Gap Theory), this paper completes the diagnostic phase of the Human Rights+ framework and outlines operational pathways for perceptual reform.

Contemporary human rights frameworks are widely understood as comprehensive systems designed to protect individuals from harm. Yet across domains including LGBT rights, migration and asylum, institutional governance, and transnational criminal ecosystems, individuals continue to experience profound harm without triggering protection mechanisms. This paper argues that such failures do not primarily result from the absence of rights, but from recognition failure prior to rights activation. Drawing on lived cross-system experience—including targeted policing for LGBT advocacy, displacement, prolonged institutional silence, kidnapping, and exposure to harm normalization within scam compounds—this paper synthesizes the Human Rights+ (HR+) framework. HR+ is articulated not as a replacement or simple extension of human rights, but as an outer perceptual spectrum—a moral perimeter that keeps emergent or unclassified harm within the field of concern until formal recognition and protection can occur. The paper introduces Perceptual Justice as a foundational requirement for rights efficacy and argues that normalizing Human Rights+ (HR+) is essential to prevent harm from disappearing between categories, procedures, and moral comfort zones. By operationalizing Perceptual Justice, HR+ reframes human rights not as static entitlements but as evolving perceptual systems.

This paper introduces the concept of Harm Attribution Gaps (HAG), a theoretical model explaining how certain harms remain unrecognised within human-rights, legal, and institutional systems. A Harm Attribution Gap arises when an individual experiences genuine injury, yet existing interpretive or procedural frameworks cannot attribute it to any recognised category of rights violation or injustice. Building on the Human Rights+ (HR+) framework and the concept of Perceptual Justice developed in earlier work, this paper argues that these gaps represent not merely legal or administrative blind spots but perceptual failures of justice. Through structural and cognitive analysis, it shows how harm is rerouted into individual fault or bureaucratic neutrality, producing systemic invisibility. By revealing how emerging or ambiguous harms escape recognition—particularly within contexts of sociotechnical complexity, displacement, and identity misclassification—the paper establishes HAG as a key mechanism of contemporary rights breakdown. It concludes that closing attribution gaps requires expanding human-rights systems through perceptual and conceptual reform, as articulated in the HR+ framework.