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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.


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.


Open Source Used in Fight for Human Rights


Counting the Civilian Dead in Iraq


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What HBR Gets Wrong About Algorithms and Bias

“Kristian Lum… organized a workshop together with Elizabeth Bender, a staff attorney for the NY Legal Aid Society and former public defender, and Terrence Wilkerson, an innocent man who had been arrested and could not afford bail. Together, they shared first hand experience about the obstacles and inefficiencies that occur in the legal system, providing valuable context to the debate around COMPAS.”


Momentous Verdict against Hissène Habré

Today we’re very pleased to hear of the verdict finding Hissène Habré guilty of crimes against humanity. Habré, president of Chad from 1982 to 1990, has been sentenced to life in prison in Dakar, Senegal, where he was tried. He is the first former head of state to be tried and found guilty of crimes against humanity in one country (Chad) by the courts of another country (Senegal).  Here’s more on the verdict from The Guardian. The verdict resonates especially with HRDAG because of our role in the trial. In September 2015, director of research Patrick Ball testified as an expert witness about the very high rates of prison mortality in ...

Benetech’s Human Rights Data Analysis Group Publishes 2010 Analysis of Human Rights Violations in Five Countries,

Analysis of Uncovered Government Data from Guatemala and Chad Clarifies History and Supports Criminal Prosecutions
By Ann Harrison
The past year of research by the Benetech Human Rights Data Analysis Group (HRDAG) has supported criminal prosecutions and uncovered the truth about political violence in Guatemala, Iran, Colombia, Chad and Liberia. On today’s celebration of the 62nd anniversary of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, HRDAG invites the international community to engage scientifically defensible methodologies that illuminate all human rights violations – including those that cannot be directly observed. 2011 will mark the 20th year that HRDAG researchers have analyzed the patterns and magnitude of human rights violations in political conflicts to determine how many of the killed and disappeared have never been accounted for – and who is most responsible.


Using statistics to estimate the true scope of the secret killings at the end of the Sri Lankan civil war

In the last three days of the Sri Lankan civil war, as thousands of people surrendered to government authorities, hundreds of people were put on buses driven by Army officers. Many were never seen again.

In a report released today (see here), the International Truth and Justice Project for Sri Lanka and the Human Rights Data Analysis Group showed that over 500 people were disappeared on only three days — 17, 18, and 19 May.


HRDAG and Amnesty International: Prison Mortality in Syria

Today Amnesty International released “‘It breaks the human’: Torture, disease and death in Syria’s prisons ,” a report detailing the conditions and mortality in Syrian prisons from 2011 to 2015, including data analysis conducted by HRDAG. The report provides harrowing accounts of ill treatment of detainees in Syrian prisons since the conflict erupted in March 2011, and publishes HRDAG’s estimate of the number of killings that occurred inside the prisons. To accompany the report, HRDAG has released a technical memo that explains the methodology, sources, and implications of the findings. The HRDAG team used data from four ...

Transitional Justice in Syria: Accountability and Reconciliation Conference

I spent last weekend in Istanbul at an excellent conference organized by the Syrian Center for Political and Strategic Studies (SCPSS). The conference included numerous non-governmental organizations (NGOs) from Syria as well as international human rights researchers and advocates. Families of victims told their stories, data collection groups discussed the challenges, and need, to document violations, transitional justice experts worried about infrastructure such as the police force and judicial system, and local leaders pledged to work together for peace. I was invited to speak about HRDAG's recent report examining killings in Syria documented by ...

HRDAG and AHPN Launch Book Detailing Collaboration

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, “Una mirada al AHPN a partir de un studio de cuantitativo,” is, as the title states, a look at the Archive’s datasets via a quantitative study. Book authors are HRDAG executive director Megan Price and AHPN colleague Carolina López, 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 ...

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Counting The Dead: How Statistics Can Find Unreported Killings

Ball analyzed the data reporters had collected from a variety of sources – including on-the-ground interviews, police records, and human rights groups – and used a statistical technique called multiple systems estimation to roughly calculate the number of unreported deaths in three areas of the capital city Manila.

The team discovered that the number of drug-related killings was much higher than police had reported. The journalists, who published their findings last month in The Atlantic, documented 2,320 drug-linked killings over an 18-month period, approximately 1,400 more than the official number. Ball’s statistical analysis, which estimated the number of killings the reporters hadn’t heard about, found that close to 3,000 people could have been killed – more than three times the police figure.

Ball said there are both moral and technical reasons for making sure everyone who has been killed in mass violence is counted.

“The moral reason is because everyone who has been murdered should be remembered,” he said. “A terrible thing happened to them and we have an obligation as a society to justice and to dignity to remember them.”


Kosovo Data – Killings, Migrations and More

Much of the debate about the March–June 1999 war between NATO and Yugoslavia turned on how many people left their homes in particular places and at certain times. Solid information about the flow of refugees out of Kosovo has helped investigators to link patterns in the flow to patterns of NATO bombing, Yugoslav strategic plans for "cleansing" Kosovo, and Yugoslav and irregular troop deployments. At its heart, the debate was about whether refugees left their homes fleeing NATO attacks and fighting between the KLA and Yugoslav forces, or whether they left their homes after being threatened, assaulted, and robbed by Yugoslav police, army, and irregu...

Direct procès Habré: le taux de mortalité dans les centres de détention, au menu des débats

Statisticien, Patrick Ball est à la barre ce vendredi matin. L’expert est entendu sur le taux de mortalité dans les centres de détention au Tchad sous Habré. Désigné par la chambre d’accusation, il dira avoir axé ses travaux sur des témoignages, des données venant des victimes et des documents de la DDS (Direction de la Documentation et de la Sécurité).


How we go about estimating casualties in Syria—Part 1

I spent the two weeks over Easter working with Patrick and Megan in San Francisco, trying to figure out a strategy of how best to estimate the number of casualties the Syrian civil war has claimed in the past two years. In January, HRDAG published a report on the number of fully identified casualties reported in the Syrian Arab Republic between March 2011 and November 2012. The number of de-duplicated records of killings for this period was 59,648, a number that is likely to be an undercount since we know that many incidences of lethal violence in conflict go unreported, and that the unreported cases are not missing at random. (more…)

The Untold Dead of Rodrigo Duterte’s Philippines Drug War

From the article: “Based on Ball’s calculations, using our data, nearly 3,000 people could have been killed in the three areas we analyzed in the first 18 months of the drug war. That is more than three times the official police count.”


Making the Case. Investigating Large Scale Human Rights Violations Using Information Systems and Data Analysis

Patrick Ball, Herbert F. Spirer, and Louise Spirer, eds. Making the Case. Investigating Large Scale Human Rights Violations Using Information Systems and Data Analysis . © 2000 American Association for the Advancement of Science. All rights reserved. Reprinted with permission. [full text] [intro] [chapters 1 2 3 4 5 67 8 9 10 11 12]


Measuring lethal counterinsurgency violence in Amritsar District, India using a referral-based sampling technique

Romesh Silva, Jeff Klingner, and Scott Weikart. “Measuring lethal counterinsurgency violence in Amritsar District, India using a referral-based sampling technique.” In JSM Proceedings, Social Statistics Section. Alexandria, VA: American Statistical Association, 2010. © 201o JSM. All rights reserved.


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