Harm Attribution Gaps: Institutional Classification and the Upstream Failure of Rights Recognition

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.