Harm Attribution Gaps: Why Serious Harm Remains Institutionally Unrecognised in Human Rights Systems

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.