Earlier this month, HRDAG and the Historic Archive of the National Police (AHPN) of Guatemala launched a book that represents a long-time collaboration between the two organizations. The book, âUna mirada al AHPN a partir de un studio de cuantitativo,â is, as the title states, a look at the Archiveâs datasets via a quantitative study. Book authors are HRDAG executive director Megan Price and AHPN colleague Carolina LĂłpez, with translations by Beatriz Vejarano. The book is available in Spanish and forthcoming in English.
The book explains how HRDAG and the Archive worked together over a decade to gain insight into the police activities that ...
A follow-up chapter exploring recent advancements in LLM technology and extraction strategies.
HRDAG has published a report about the 500 Tamils who disappeared while in Army custody in Sri Lanka in 2009.
Field Consultant
Carolina LopĂ©z has worked with the Archivo HistĂłrico de la PolicĂa Nacional (AHPN) in Guatemala for eight years, and is currently a member of the Archive Technical Coordination team. A professional working within the social sciences, she prefers using alternative research on past practices to develop an understanding of the present. Her work consists primarily of monitoring and creating strategies to systematize, track and create process controls. She also has thorough knowledge of management of historical archive documents.
Since 2006, Carolina has worked in quantitative research at the AHPN with HRDAG team members Patrick ...
Amelia Hoover Green and Patrick Ball (2019). Civilian killings and disappearances during civil war in El Salvador (1980â1992). Demographic Research, 1 October 2019. © 2019 Demographic Research. DOI: 10.4054/DemRes.2019.41.27
Amelia Hoover Green and Patrick Ball (2019). Civilian killings and disappearances during civil war in El Salvador (1980â1992). Demographic Research, 1 October 2019. © 2019 Demographic Research. DOI: 10.4054/DemRes.2019.41.27
Using multiple system estimation, we estimate the total population of social movement leaders killed in Colombia during 2018.
Today The Tor Project announced that it has elected a new Board of Directors, and among them is HRDAG executive director Megan Price. The Tor Project is a nonprofit advocacy group that promotes online privacy and provides software that helps users opt out of online tracking.
Megan and Patrick have long maintained that encryption and privacy are essential for enabling human rights work. Patrick's ideas are described in Monday's FedScoop story about encryption, human rights, and the U.S. State Department.
âHuman rights groups depend on strong cryptography in order to hold governments accountable," says Patrick. "HRDAG depends on local human ...
In December 2006, Human Rights Watch (HRW) issued a report documenting torture and unlawful killings committed by Bangladesh's Rapid Action Battalion (RAB), an elite anti-crime and anti-terrorism force. According to HRW, many of the deaths for which RAB is responsible resulted from summary executions or extreme physical abuse. 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 who worked within the Benetech Human Rights Program at the time, and who now works with HRDAG.
While researching these incidents, HRW compiled ...
The online version of the 2019 Year-End Review will appear in January 2020.
Elizabeth Eagen of the Citizens and Technology Lab at Cornell University will expand the HRDAG advisory board.
The primer addresses what pretrial risk assessment is and what the research supports.
This week, we join our friends and colleagues in feeling horrified by the violence in Charlottesville, Virginia. As we have for the past 26 years, we stand with the victims of violence and support human rights and dignity for all. We spend our careers observing and documenting mass political violence across the world. The demands by the so-called âalt-rightâ to normalize racism and social exclusion are all too familiar to us.
At HRDAG, our work is always guided by the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR). We reaffirm our commitment to these principles, in particular that the ârecognition of the inherent dignity and of the equal and ...
On the anniversary of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, HRDAG executive director Megan Price tells us why she loves her work, and why she feels hopeful about the future.
Dear Friends,
This has been quite a year, and I donât just mean the recent political events in the United States, Europe and the Middle East.
Thanks to your ongoing support, HRDAG has a number of accomplishments to be proud of this year:
Patrickâs testimony in the trial of Hissene HabrĂ© for crimes against humanity was cited by the judges three times in their determination of guilt.
We launched a book describing ten years of collaborative work with the Historic Archive of the National Police in Guatemala.
We contributed quantitative analyses to Amnesty Internationalâs report on deaths in Syrian custody, and published an ...
ExploraciĂłn y anĂĄlisis de los datas para comprender la realidad. Patrick Ball y Michael Reed Hurtado. 2015. Forensis 16, no. 1 (July): 529-545. © 2015 Instituto Nacional de Medicina Legal y Ciencias Forenses (RepĂșblica de Colombia).
In late 2006, a statistical study of deaths that occurred after the invasion of Iraq ignited a storm of controversy. This Lancet study estimated that more than 650,000 additional Iraqis died during the invasion than would have at pre-invasion death rates, a vastly higher estimate than any previous. But in January, a World Health Organization study placed the number at about 150,000.
Anita Gohdes and Megan Price (2013). Journal of Conflict Resolution, Volume 57 Issue 6 December 2013. © 2013 Journal of Conflict Resolution. All rights reserved. Reprinted with permission of SAGE. [online abstract]DOI: 10.1177/0022002712459708.
HRDAG associate Miguel Cruz has an epiphany. All those data heâs drowning in? Each datapoint is a personal tragedy, a story both dark and urgent, and heâs privileged to have access.
Megan Price, director of research, is quoted from her Strata talk, regarding how to handle multiple data sources in conflicts such as the one in Syria. From the blogpost:
âThe true number of casualties in conflicts like the Syrian war seems unknowable, but the mission of the Human Rights Data Analysis Group (HRDAG) is to make sense of such information, clouded as it is by the fog of war. They do this not by nominating one source of information as the âbestâ, but instead with statistical modeling of the differences between sources.â
