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Lies, Damned Lies and Official Statistics

This essay in the Health and Human Rights Journal addresses attempts to undermine Covid-19 data collection.

HRDAG Wins the Rafto Prize

The Rafto Foundation, an international human rights organization, has bestowed the 2021 Rafto Prize to HRDAG for its distinguished work defending human rights and democracy.

Human Rights and the Decentralized Web

Our partners were eager to learn and talk about emerging decentralized technology.

Drug-Related Killings in the Philippines

HRDAG analysis shows that the government figures are a gross underestimation of the drug-related killings in the Philippines.

Tchad Foire Aux Quesions

Violations de droits de l'homme par l'Etat tchadien sous le régime de Hissène Habré [English] Quels sont les principaux résultats de ce rapport? Quelles violations de droits de l'homme commises dans les prisons de la DDS ont été prouvées? Quelle preuve il y a t-il que Habré et la direction de la DDS étaient responsables pour ces violations de droits de l'homme? D'où proviennent les documents internes de la DDS? En quelle mesure l'analyse comprise dans le rapport contribue t-elle a l'affaire judiciaire Hissène Habré? Est-ce que HRDAG donne des estimations concernant le nombre total de personnes tuées dans les prisons par la DDS - les ...

Trips to and from Guatemala

HRDAG has been working with the Historic Archive of the National Police in Guatemala (hereafter, the Archive) for the past seven years.  The Archive contains a treasure trove of data recorded and kept by the Guatemalan National Police over the past century.  When the Archive was first discovered in 2005, researchers there immediately recognized both the value and fragility of the tens of millions of documents.  As a result, they reached out to HRDAG, and we reached out to volunteers at Westat to devise a plan to estimate the contents of the entire Archive as quickly as possible in case the documents were destroyed or access to them was limited.  ...

HRDAG Drops Dropbox

On Wednesday, April 9, the file hosting service Dropbox announced the addition of Condoleezza Rice, former U.S. National Security Advisor and Secretary of State, to their Board of Directors, citing the need for “a leader who could help us expand our global footprint.” In response to this announcement, HRDAG requested (and rapidly received) a refund for our recent purchase of Dropbox for Business, and will drop the use of their service entirely. Patrick Ball, HRDAG’s Executive Director stated: “As a human rights organization, we find Condoleezza Rice's complicity in the serious human rights abuses of the Bush administration very worrying. ...

Are journalists lowballing the number of Iraqi war dead?

The Columbia Journalism Review investigates the casualty count in Iraq, more than a decade after the U.S. invasion. HRDAG executive director Patrick Ball is quoted. “IBC is very good at covering the bombs that go off in markets,” said Patrick Ball, an analyst at the Human Rights Data Analysis Group who says his whole career is to study “people being killed.” But quiet assassinations and military skirmishes away from the capital often receive little or no media attention.


All the Dead We Cannot See

Ball, a statistician, has spent the last two decades finding ways to make the silence speak. He helped pioneer the use of formal statistical modeling, and, later, machine learning—tools more often used for e-commerce or digital marketing—to measure human rights violations that weren’t recorded. In Guatemala, his analysis helped convict former dictator General Efraín Ríos Montt of genocide in 2013. It was the first time a former head of state was found guilty of the crime in his own country.


Improving the estimate of U.S. police killings

Cory Doctorow of Boing Boing writes about HRDAG executive director Patrick Ball and his contribution to Carl Bialik's article about the recently released Bureau of Justice Statistics report on the number of annual police killings, both reported and unreported, in 538 Politics. Doctorow writes: Patrick Ball and the Human Rights Data Analysis Group applied the same statistical rigor that he uses in estimating the scale of atrocities and genocides for Truth and Reconciliation panels in countries like Syria and Guatemala to the problem of estimating killing by US cops, and came up with horrific conclusions. Ball was responding to a set of new estima...

Measuring Elusive Populations with Bayesian Model Averaging for Multiple Systems Estimation: A Case Study on Lethal Violations in Casanare, 1998-2007

Kristian Lum, Megan Price, Tamy Guberek, and Patrick Ball. “Measuring Elusive Populations with Bayesian Model Averaging for Multiple Systems Estimation: A Case Study on Lethal Violations in Casanare, 1998-2007,” Statistics, Politics, and Policy. 1(1) 2010. All rights reserved.


How Do We Know the Death Toll in Syria Is Accurate?


Inside the Difficult, Dangerous Work of Tallying the ISIS Death Toll

HRDAG executive director Megan Price is interviewed by Mother Jones. An excerpt: “Violence can be hidden,” says Price. “ISIS has its own agenda. Sometimes that agenda is served by making public things they’ve done, and I have to assume, sometimes it’s served by hiding things they’ve done.”


Improving the estimate of U.S. police killings

Cory Doctorow of Boing Boing writes about HRDAG executive director Patrick Ball and his contribution to Carl Bialik’s article about the recently released Bureau of Justice Statistics report on the number of annual police killings, both reported and unreported, in 538 Politics.


The Statistics of Mortality Due to Conflict in Peru

A key point is that human rights data collection prior to the TRC largely ignored violence by the Shining Path.

Coming soon: HRDAG 2019 Year-End Review

The online version of the 2019 Year-End Review will appear in January 2020.            

Procès Hissène Habré : Le statisticien fait état d’un taux de mortalité de 2,37% par jour

Les auditions d’experts se poursuivent au palais de justice de Dakar sur le procès de l’ex-président tchadien Hissène Habré. Hier, c’était au tour de Patrick Ball, seul inscrit au rôle, commis par la chambre d’accusation de N’Djamena pour dresser les statistiques sur le taux de mortalité dans les centres de détention.


To predict and serve?

Kristian Lum and William Isaac (2016). To predict and serve? Significance. October 10, 2016. © 2016 The Royal Statistical Society. 

Kristian Lum and William Isaac (2016). To predict and serve? Significance. October 10, 2016. © 2016 The Royal Statistical Society. 


Beautiful game, ugly truth?

Megan Price (2022). Beautiful game, ugly truth? Significance, 19: 18-21. December 2022. © The Royal Statistical Society. https://doi.org/10.1111/1740-9713.01702

Megan Price (2022). Beautiful game, ugly truth? Significance, 19: 18-21. December 2022. © The Royal Statistical Society. https://doi.org/10.1111/1740-9713.01702


A Comparison of Marginal and Conditional Models for Capture–Recapture Data with Application to Human Rights Violations Data

Shira Mitchell, Al Ozonoff, Alan Zaslavsky, Bethany Hedt-Gauthier, Kristian Lum and Brent Coull (2013). A Comparison of Marginal and Conditional Models for Capture-Recapture Data with Application to Human Rights Violations Data. Biometrics, Volume 69, Issue 4, pages 1022–1032, December 2013. © 2013, The International Biometric Society. DOI: 10.1111/biom.12089.

Shira Mitchell, Al Ozonoff, Alan Zaslavsky, Bethany Hedt-Gauthier, Kristian Lum and Brent Coull (2013). A Comparison of Marginal and Conditional Models for Capture-Recapture Data with Application to Human Rights Violations Data. Biometrics, Volume 69Issue 4pages 1022–1032December 2013. © 2013, The International Biometric Society. DOI: 10.1111/biom.12089.


Our work has been used by truth commissions, international criminal tribunals, and non-governmental human rights organizations. We have worked with partners on projects on five continents.

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