Human Rights+: Harm Attribution Gap Theory

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.