El Salvador
One of the earliest large-scale human rights information
projects was the Salvadoran Human Rights Commission, also known as
Comision de Derechos Humanos de El Salvador (CDHES).
Over 9,000 testimonies were taken in an effort to understand the
nature and scope of the bloody conflict between the army and the
Farabundo Marti National Liberation Front (FMLN). This complex database
linked human rights violations with the career structures of individual
military officers to create a statistical profile of each officer's
actions throughout his career. The resulting data was instrumental
in aiding the Commissions work to remove members of the Salvadoran
military who were the worst human rights abusers.
While at the American Association for the Advancement
of Science, Dr. Patrick Ball's innovative work in database design
and statistical
analysis led the way to discovering the truth about the conflict
and purging the military of those deemed the most egregious in
their abuses.
http://shr.aaas.org/mtc/chap01.html
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