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HRDAG’s Year in Review: 2020

In 2020, HRDAG provided clarity on issues related to the pandemic, police misconduct, and more.

HRDAG’s Year in Review: 2024

In 2024, HRDAG maximized AI's strengths to support partners.

The John Maddox Prize for Patrick Ball

Congratulations to Patrick on this well deserved award!

Guatemala’s Bol de la Cruz Found Guilty

Today Guatemala’s former national police chief Colonel Héctor Rafael Bol de la Cruz was convicted and sentenced to 40 years in prison for his role in the 1984 kidnapping and disappearance of 27-year-old student union leader Fernando Garcia, who was last seen when officers detained him outside his home. Along with Bol de la Cruz, former senior police officer Jorge Gomez was also tried; he received a sentence of 40 years in prison. That verdict comes in part because of testimony this month by HRDAG’s Patrick Ball, who served as an expert witness and presented data analysis done with colleague Daniel Guzmán to assess the flow of thousands of ...

HRDAG Report on Disappeared Tamils in Army Custody in Sri Lanka

HRDAG has published a report about the 500 Tamils who disappeared while in Army custody in Sri Lanka in 2009.

Identifiers of Detained Children Have Implications for Data Security and Estimation

Identifiers being sequential could make possible estimations of the population of detained children.

In Pursuit of Excellent Data Processing

With help from HRDAG, Roman Rivera built the data backbone for the Invisible Institute's Citizens Police Data Project.

Welcoming Our 2019-2020 Visiting Data Science Student

Bing Wang has joined HRDAG as a Visiting Data Science Student until the summer of 2020.

The Death Toll in Syria


Reflections: The G in HRDAG is the Real Fuel

It took me a while to realize I had become part of the HRDAG incubator—at least that’s what it felt like to me—for young data analysts who wanted to use statistical knowledge to make a real impact on human rights debates.

Documents of war: Understanding the Syrian Conflict

Megan Price, Anita Gohdes, and Patrick Ball. 2015. Significance 12, no. 2 (April): 14–19. doi: 10.1111/j.1740-9713.2015.00811.x. © 2015 The Royal Statistical Society. All rights reserved. [online abstract]


Partners

How we work with partners is how we relate to the whole human rights community. We work with human rights advocates and defenders to support their goals by complementing their substantive expertise with our technical expertise. To date, partners have included truth commissions, international criminal tribunals, United Nations missions, and non-governmental human rights organizations on five continents. Here are a few stories that illustrate how we work with our partners: HRDAG partner stories: Quantifying Police Misconduct in Louisiana (2023) Scraping for Pattern: Protecting Immigrant Rights in Washington State (2022) Police Violence ...

Sierra Leone

Following a brutal 11-year civil war, the Parliament of Sierra Leone called for a Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC) to create "an impartial, historical record of the conflict", and "address impunity; respond to the needs of victims; promote healing and reconciliation; and prevent a repetition of the violations and abuses suffered." The full text of the TRC report is available on the Sierra Leone Web. HRDAG assisted the TRC to build a systematic data coding system, electronic database, and secure data analysis process to manage the thousands of statements given to them in the course of their work. Dr. Ball visited Freetown twice, and HRDAG ...

Core Concepts

Inaccurate statistics can damage the credibility of human rights claims—and that's why we strive to ensure that statistics about human rights violations are generated with as much rigor and are as scientifically accurate as possible. But, what are the pitfalls leading to inaccuracy—when, where, and how do data become compromised? How are patterns biased by having only partial data? And what are the best scientific methods for collecting, managing, processing and analyzing data? Here are the data pitfalls that HRDAG has identified, as well as some of our approaches for meeting these challenges. We believe that human rights researchers must take ...

On the Use of Sample Surveys and Multiple Systems Estimations in Assessing Large-Scale Human Rights Violations: Recent Experiences from Timor-Leste.

Romesh Silva and Patrick Ball. “On the Use of Sample Surveys and Multiple Systems Estimations in Assessing Large-Scale Human Rights Violations: Recent Experiences from Timor-Leste.” Proceedings of the Social Statistics Section – Joint Statistical Meetings. New York, (USA). August, 2005.


The Bigness of Big Data: samples, models, and the facts we might find when looking at data

Patrick Ball. 2015. The Bigness of Big Data: samples, models, and the facts we might find when looking at data. In The Transformation of Human Rights Fact-Finding, ed. Philip Alston and Sarah Knuckey. New York: Oxford University Press. ISBN: 9780190239497. © The Oxford University Press. All rights reserved.


FAT* Conference 2018

Kristian Lum spoke about "Understanding the Context and Consequences of Pre-Trial Detention" at the Conference on Fairness, Accountability, and Transparency (FAT*).

The Demography of Conflict-Related Mortality in Timor-Leste (1974-1999): Empirical Quantitative Measurement of Civilian Killings, Disappearances & Famine-Related Deaths

Romesh Silva and Patrick Ball. “The Demography of Conflict-Related Mortality in Timor-Leste (1974-1999): Empirical Quantitative Measurement of Civilian Killings, Disappearances & Famine-Related Deaths” In Statistical Methods for Human Rights, J. Asher, D. Banks and F. Scheuren, eds., Springer (New York) (2007)


El Salvador

Some of the earliest large-scale human rights information projects happened in El Salvador. One was developed by Patrick Ball at the Salvadoran non-governmental Human Rights Commission, also known as Comision de Derechos Humanos de El Salvador (CDHES-ng). Between 1977 and 1990, more than 9,000 testimonies were taken in an effort to document the nature and scope of the bloody conflict between the army and the Farabundo Marti National Liberation Front (FMLN). Starting in 1991, Patrick worked with CDHES staff to organize the information in an early computer database. They linked reported human rights violations with the career structures of individual ...

Political Killings in Kosovo, March–June, 1999

Political Killings in Kosovo, March–June, 1999. American Association for the Advancement of Science, Science and Human Rights Program. © 2000 American Bar Association Central and East European Law Initiative.


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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