Our human rights program is meeting its sustainability plan thanks to support from people like MacArthur. Our costs are covered by a combination of core support and project-specific funding that we raise in partnership with other human rights groups. Multiyear support for our human rights programs is especially helpful, as it provides us with continuity as well as the ability to invest in core capabilities such as software development for which no one customer can bear the cost. Our goals with core funding, such as the MacArthur support, is to expand our ability to strengthen the global human rights movement with science and technology to make the case for human rights as strong as possible.

We appreciate the support from the MacArthur Foundation, and we look forward to three very productive years!

More on the case against Habré at Human Rights Watch's website.

Click here for more on HRDAG's collaboration with Human Rights Watch.

As per CAVR's mandate, codified in UNTAET Regulation UNTAET/REG/2001/10, the President of Timor-Leste will hand over the CAVR Final Report to the Secretary General of the United Nations in early December 2005. When the CAVR final report is made public, HRDAG has agreed to co-publish the "Profile of Human Rights Violations in Timor-Leste, 1974-1999" chapter. Furthermore, Benetech will publish anonymized versions of the data from the CAVR interviews, the gravesite census, and the retrospective mortality survey conducted by the CAVR. These data will promote further research on past violations in Timor-Leste. For more information about HRDAG's work with CAVR in Timor-Leste, please refer to HRDAG Timor-Leste Project.

All of the personal information about victims and statement-givers has been removed from the published dataset, but the dataset offers a rich resource for continuing analysis of statistical patterns of human rights violations in Sierra Leone documented by the TRC.

The variable definitions are available in English and in Spanish. The data were prepared for publication by Daniel Guzmán, Tamy Guberek, Kristen Cibelli, Romesh Silva, Richard Conibere, Rafe Kaplan, Scott Weikart, Jana Dudukovic and Patrick Ball.

Read the press release.

In 2005, the CAVR compiled a definitive report entitled "Chega!" ("Enough!") detailing human rights abuses during the Indonesian occupation of East Timor from 1975-1999. Benetech has now released a PDF of its statistical report which contributed to the CAVR's findings by establishing that at least 102,800 (+/- 11,000) Timorese died as a result of human rights violations in Timor-Leste from 1974-1999. Read the new FAQ which answers questions about this study and coverage by Wired Magazine.

The Martus Client 3.0 release includes a new reporting feature and gives users more options for customization. The 3.0 release also provides enhanced speed, import and search features. The full release notes and download of the new release are available for download. Martus 3.0 is available in English and Spanish, with "Language Packs" for other languages placed on the documentation page as they become available.

It brings together more than 3-years of meticulous analysis by historians, statisticians, demographers, lawyers, anthropologists and sociologists. Benetech is proud to have provided long-term technical assistance to the CAVR in its data collection and statistical analysis. Read the press release here.

The statistical analysis presented in the report, “Judge, Jury, and Death: Torture and Executions by Bangladesh’s Elite Security Force,” was conducted by Romesh Silva, a statistician with the Benetech Human Rights Program. The report concludes that between June 2004 and October 2006, the RAB killed at least 367 people in Bangladesh and tortured hundreds more.

Benetech's statistical analysis helped HRW explain the statistical patterns of the killings over time and with respect to the specific units with the RAB that were most responsible for the violence.

The defendants were indicted together with former Serb and Yugoslav president Slobodan Milosevic in May of 1999 in connection with the deaths and displacement of thousands of ethnic Albanians in Kosovo province during the spring of 1999. Dr. Ball originally testified for the ICTY in the trial of Milosevic in March of 2002. Read the press release here.

Zador and Shapiro, who are members of the American Statistical Association, have consulted to HRDAG on the scientific sampling method used at the National Police Archive project. The estimated 80 million records in the archive contain critical information about police procedures during Guatemala's 36 years of armed internal conflict that resulted in 200,000 deaths and disappearances. The archive is the largest single cache of documents made available to human rights investigators in Latin America.

The event was hosted by the United Nations Development Program and the Guatemalan Human Rights Ombudsman which is overseeing the archive project.

The report is part of an ongoing initiative to create a massive, objective and undeniable statistical record of past and present human rights violations in Sri Lanka. This project aims to augment human rights monitoring and reporting by non-governmental groups in order to positively influence the Sri Lankan peace process. By ensuring that arguments about the total magnitude, pattern and levels of responsibility associated with mass violations are informed by science, human rights debates about truth and accountability will be enriched.

The report, "Missing People In Casanare" estimates that the total number of missing persons in Casanare from 1986-2007 is 2,553 compared to the 1,544 persons reported missing during this period. This analysis suggests that between thirty and forty percent of missing persons in Casanare were unreported during this period. While the rate of undocumented missing persons in Casanare does not represent the rate that could be found in all of Colombia's 32 departments, the report argues that additional data should be gathered throughout the country and made available for rigorous analysis by statisticians and social scientists. More information on the report can be found on Colombia project page of the HRDAG web site.

The archive segment aired on the East Coast on May 27th and in the San Francisco Bay area on KQED Channel 9 on Tuesday, June 10th at 9:00 PM PST.

The case is based on documentary evidence and well as the testimony of victims and those who worked for Habré. The complaint alleges that Habré created and controlled a political police force, the Documentation and Security Directorate (DDS), which systematically tortured political opponents and members of ethnic groups perceived as hostile to his regime. In 2001, Human Rights Watch discovered a cache of DDS files in its abandoned headquarters in N'Djamena, Chad. Among the tens of thousands of documents were daily lists of prisoners and deaths in detention, interrogation reports, surveillance reports, and death certificates. A preliminary analysis of the data by HRDAG showed that a total of 12,321 different victims were mentioned in the documents, including the deaths in detention of 1,208 individuals.

Bogotá Colombia — The Spanish version of Dr. Patrick Ball's well-known manual, Who Did What to Whom?: Planning and Implementing a Large-Scale Human Rights Data Project,has been published under the title ¿Quién le hizo qué a quién? Planear e implementar un proyecto a gran escala de información en derechos humanos.

Originally published under the auspices of the American Association for the Advancement of Science in 1996, the manual has long been a reference for human rights institutions that gather, analyze, and process information on human rights violations. The manual is based on Dr. Ball's many years of work in human rights information management. Read the press release for more information on this publication.

The story includes comments from Dr. Patrick Ball, Director of Benetech's Human Rights Program. The archive project was also covered in a recent story about Benetech by Investor's Business Daily. Benetech's Martus and HRDAG teams have provided technology to collect, organize, secure and back up data collected from the archive which includes an estimated 80 million records. The recovered police records, which were the subject of Guatemalan government report last month, could provide critical information about the estimated 200,000 people dead or missing during Guatemala's 36-year civil war and help bring perpetrators to justice.

HRDAG provided the statistical expertise to transform information from the TRC statements into scientifically-defensible knowledge to create a clear historical record and help end impunity for the perpetrators of human rights abuses in Liberia. According to the HRDAG report, former Liberian President Charles Taylor &mdash already on trial for war crimes and crimes against humanity for his role in Sierra Leone's civil war &mdash also led the Liberian rebel group responsible for the largest number of violations during Liberia's 24 years of civil unrest.

I managed the project in which we analyzed more than 17,000 victim and witness statements collected by the Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC) in Liberia and compiled the data into a report entitled "Descriptive Statistics From Statements to the Liberian Truth and Reconciliation Commission." The HRDAG analysis is included as an annex to the TRC's Final Report released on July 1 in Monrovia, Liberia. The TRC's report has been covered extensively in the press, but the media coverage has largely overlooked the broader role of the TRC in Liberia and the larger purpose of truth commissions around the world. Read more here.

Read the press release for HRDAG's report for the Liberian Truth and Reconciliation Commission. Read our FAQ on the purpose of truth commissions.

The article recounts how Benetech's Human Rights Program is collecting a random scientific sample and conducting an analysis of the estimated 80 million documents contained in the archive. The collected data contains critical information about the involvement of the National Police in the killing and disappearance of an estimated 200,000 people during Guatemala's 36 years of internal conflict. Dr. Patrick Ball, director of Benetech's Human Rights Program, notes in the article that the archive presented a unique challenge that was "longer-term, more scientifically complex and more politically sensitive" than any of Benetech's previous projects.

The article notes that HRDAG estimated in its 2007 study "Missing People In Casanare" that the total number of missing persons in Casanare from 1986-2007 is 2,553. HRDAG's analysis suggests that between thirty and forty percent of missing persons in Casanare were unreported during this period. Read more about HRDAG's analysis of disappearances in Colombia.

But in the blog item posted below, HRDAG researchers question the HSR claim that "nationwide mortality rates actually fall during most wars" and that "today's wars rarely kill enough people to reverse the decline in peacetime mortality that has been underway in the developing world for more than 30 years."

Anita Gohdes, Megan Price, and Patrick Ball write that they are deeply skeptical of the methods and data used by the HSR authors to conclude that conflict-related deaths are decreasing. "We believe that the authors should examine their own data on mortality related deaths with the same rigor with which they critique the recent IRC surveys," write the HRDAG researchers. "If they did this, they would find that they have inadequate information to conclude anything about the trend in war-related lethality in recent decades." HRDAG's concerns about the estimates of war deaths by the HSR authors are discussed by noted statistician Andrew Gelman on his blog.

“History, victims, and the survivors need to know how many people have been killed and disappeared in Casanare,” said Tamy Guberek, the study's lead author and the Benetech Human Rights Program Latin America Coordinator. “We must determine how many victims of violence in Casanare have never been accounted for by any documentation project. This report provides invaluable estimates of the number of invisible victims. If we cannot name all the victims, at minimum, we can count them.”

The HRDAG study analyzed information about victims of killings and disappearances provided by 15 datasets submitted by Colombia government agencies and civil society organizations. The authors found that the peak in overall disappearances in 2001 largely took place in the southern region of Casanare, precisely at the time when reported killings in that region were at the lowest. The report concludes that disappearances are committed in different times and places than killings, suggesting that perpetrators changed their methods of lethal violence during the course of the conflict. Read more here.

All of the personal information has been removed from the published dataset to protect the identities of victims and statement givers. The dataset can be used to replicate the analysis presented in our report, "Descriptive Statistics From Statements to the Liberian Truth and Reconciliation Commission." The data can also be used for extended analysis of statistical patterns of human rights violations reported to the TRC.

The paper reviewed by Price and Guzmán concludes that ". . . on average, violence against unionists in Colombia is neither systematic nor targeted." However, in their response, Price and Guzmán present - in technical and methodological detail - the reasons they find the conclusions in Mejía and Uribe's study to be overstated. Price and Guzmán believe that weaknesses in the data, in the choice of the statistical model, and the interpretation of the model used in Mejía and Uribe's study, all raise serious questions about the authors' strong causal conclusions.

Price and Guzmán point out that unchecked, these conclusions reached by Mejía and Uribe may distort the truth about violence against unions and can mislead important social, economic and political decisions in Colombia. They welcome the opportunity to have a methodological rather than ideological debate about union violence. Read more here.