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Syria
On the heels of the Arab Spring revolutions, which began in December 2010, armed conflicts began in Syria in March 2011. What started as protests demanding that President Bashar al-Assad resign resulted in the deployment of the Syrian Army to stop the uprising. Since then, violent conflict has been raging in Syria. Amid this continuing violence and humanitarian crisis, local human rights activists and citizen journalists risk their lives to document human rights violations. The grave challenges they face are compounded by the regime's active suppression of information flow out of the country. As a result, there is considerable uncertainty about the ...
Remembering Scott Weikart
HRDAG’s core values all have a connection to Scott Weikart, 1951–2023.
Newsletters
2025
24 June, 2025 - Breaking through the noise with evidence
20 March, 2025 - Focus on HRDAG’s US-based projects
2024
10 December, 2024 - Witnessing Syria on Human Rights Day
29 November, 2024 - Giving thanks
20 November, 2024 - We are resolute
22 October, 2024 - Gaining insights into wrongful convictions
9 October, 2024 - A new tool for tracking police misconduct
18 September, 2024 - Evaluating gunshot detection technology
18 June, 2024 - A Pulitzer for an HRDAG partner
1 March, 2024 - Citations with impact
2023
21 December, 2023 - Evaluating tools to weed out discrimination
15 December, 2023 - ...
Podcast: Dr. Patrick Ball on Using Statistics to Uncover Truth
Dr. Patrick Ball recently visited the Plutopia News Network podcast for a wide-ranging, inspiring conversation about his work for the Human Rights Data Analysis Group.
Patrick spoke about how he first discovered human rights work during his time in El Salvador with the Peace Brigades International. That led to his ongoing work as a statistician and computer programmer working to assess and analyze human rights violations. He also unpacked some common statistical techniques used by researchers at Human Rights Data Analysis Group, such as multiple systems estimation, which uses multiple different datasets to gain insights into the data we don't ...
How Causal Analysis Confirmed Impact of Cash Bail on Verdicts
Causal inference methods show that for indigent clients, money bail increases their likelihood of a guilty conviction.
Reflections: Challenging Tasks and Meticulous Defenders
I have made it my personal objective to amplify HRDAG's message of being extra careful and scientifically rigorous with human rights data.
Violence in Blue: The 2020 Update
HRDAG has refreshed a 2016 Granta article about homicides committed by police in the United States.
Reflections: A Love Letter to HRDAG
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.
Police transparency expands with new national database — except Michigan
Tarak Shah is quoted with regard to the National Police Index: “Police often avoid accountability by moving to another agency rather than face discipline. This tool, allowing anyone to look up and track the histories of such officers, provides an invaluable service for the human rights community in our fight against impunity.”
Can the Armed Conflict Become Part of Colombia’s History?
Paula Amado and María Juliana Durán Fedullo reflect on how the Truth Commission may change Colombia’s history, finally officially acknowledging the 50-year conflict and its casualties, and reckoning with who did what to whom.
HRDAG Testimony in Guatemala Retrials
HRDAG analysis presented by Patrick found that 5 percent of the indigenous Maya Ixil population was killed in a 15-month period.
Reflections: Some Stories Shape You
The first time I met anyone at HRDAG, I was a journalist. It was 2006. I was working on a story about a graduate student at Carnegie Mellon who’d collaborated with the organization on a survey in Sierra Leone, and I contacted Patrick Ball to discuss the work. At the time, I found him challenging.
But I thought his work—trying to estimate how many people were killed, or, in that study, otherwise injured, during wars—was fascinating. Over the next few years, I got to know other researchers working on similar questions. In 2008, as the war in Iraq ramped up, I spoke with epidemiologists from Johns Hopkins University, the World Health Organiz...
Deportation Possible for El Salvador’s Gen. García – Supported by HRDAG Analysis
Gen. José Guillermo García, El Salvador’s defense minister from 1979 to 1983, may be deported from Florida to El Salvador because of his involvement in war crimes that occurred under his command. The recommendation comes from a Miami immigration judge, whose decision was supported with expert testimony from Stanford political science professor Terry Karl, who presented extensive statistical analysis of killings, disappearances, kidnappings, torture and other crimes under Gen. García’s watch. The statistical analysis was a joint effort between Professor Karl and Amelia Hoover Green and Patrick Ball of Human Rights Data Analysis Group (HRDAG). ...
Data Archaeology for Human Rights in Central America: HRDAG Collaborates with UWCHR
Patrick Ball is kicking himself for a decision he made almost 25 years ago. “I was clever, but I wasn’t smart,” he says ruefully, as he considers the labyrinth of tables and ASCII-encoded keystrings he used to design a database of human rights violations for the pioneering Salvadoran non-governmental Human Rights Commission (CDHES). Now I’m sitting in his office in San Francisco’s Mission District watching over his shoulder, and trying to keep up, as he bangs out code to decipher the priceless data contained in these old files. Created in 1991 and 1992, during the last days of El Salvador’s internal armed conflict, the files detail ...
The UDHR Turns 70
We're thinking about how rigorous analysis can fortify debates about components of our criminal justice system such as cash bail, pretrial risk assessment and fairness in general.
Reflections: A Simple Plan
I got an email from my superheroic PhD adviser in June 2006: Would I be interested in relocating to Palo Alto for six months in order to work with Patrick Ball at the Human Rights Data Analysis Group? (She'd gotten a grant and would cover my stipend.) Since I'd spent the last several months in New Haven wrestling ineffectually with giant, brain-melting methodological problems, I said yes immediately.
The plan with my adviser was simple: I'd digitize the ancient, multiply-photocopied pages of data from the United Nations Truth Commission for El Salvador, combine them with two other datasets, match across all the records, and produce reliable ...
Skoll World Forum 2018
Illuminating Data's Dark Side: Big data create conveniences, but we must consider who designs these tools, who benefits from them, and who is left out of the equation.
HRDAG Names New Board Members Julie Broome and Frank Schulenburg
We are pleased to announce that HRDAG will be supported by two additions to our Advisory Board, Julie Broome and Frank Schulenburg.
We’ve worked with Julie for many years, getting to know her when she was Director of Programmes at The Sigrid Rausing Trust. She is now the Director of London-based Ariadne, a network of European funders and philanthropists. She worked at the Trust for seven years, most notably Head of Human Rights, before becoming Director of Programmes in 2014. Before joining the Trust she was Programme Director at the CEELI Institute in Prague, where she was responsible for conducting rule of law-related trainings for judges and ...
HRDAG Welcomes New Data Science Fellow
Our newest Data Science Fellow, Will Taylor, is currently a doctoral student in political science and public policy at the University of Michigan.
HRDAG Welcomes Two New Scholars
Paula Amado has joined as a Research Scholar, and María Juliana Durán Fedullo has joined as a Visiting Scholar.