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Corrigendum: Killings and Refugee Flow in Kosovo, March–June, 1999 (A report to ICTY)

Responses to questions from ICTY office Corrigendum: Killings and Refugee Flow in Kosovo, March–June, 1999 (A report to ICTY) . © 2002 AAAS and ABA CEELI.


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 ...

The Profile of Human Rights Violations in Timor-Leste, 1974-1999

Romesh Silva and Patrick Ball. “The Profile of Human Rights Violations in Timor-Leste, 1974-1999″, a Report by the Benetech Human Rights Data Analysis Group to the Commission on Reception, Truth and Reconciliation. 9 February 2006.


Killings and Refugee Flow in Kosovo, March–June, 1999 (A report to ICTY).

Patrick Ball, Wendy Betts, Fritz Scheuren, Jana Dudukovic, and Jana Asher. Killings and Refugee Flow in Kosovo, March–June, 1999 (A report to ICTY). © 2002 American Association for the Advancement of Science and American Bar Association Central and East European Law Initiative. [full text]


Privacy Policy

Mailing List Subscription We use Mailchimp to help us keep track of community members who want to stay informed about what HRDAG is doing and thinking. If you self-subscribe to our list, we will never share your contact information. We will never subscribe anyone who does not explicitly agree to a subscription.  Over the course of a year, we mail quarterly letters and fundraising letters, as well as one or two updates as events demand. If, during the course of a fundraising campaign, you make a donation, we will do our best to remove you from the remainder of fundraising mailings that year. We may use your contact information to invite you to ...

Data ‘hashing’ improves estimate of the number of victims in databases

But while HRDAG’s estimate relied on the painstaking efforts of human workers to carefully weed out potential duplicate records, hashing with statistical estimation proved to be faster, easier and less expensive. The researchers said hashing also had the important advantage of a sharp confidence interval: The range of error is plus or minus 1,772, or less than 1 percent of the total number of victims.

“The big win from this method is that we can quickly calculate the probable number of unique elements in a dataset with many duplicates,” said Patrick Ball, HRDAG’s director of research. “We can do a lot with this estimate.”


Judges in Habré Trial Cite HRDAG Analysis

Three months after the announcement of the momentous verdict finding former Chadian president Hissène Habré guilty of crimes against humanity, the presiding judges have released the full, written 681-page judgment of the court. Testimony given by HRDAG’s director of research, Patrick Ball, is mentioned at three points in the verdict. The judges included in their written judgment the HRDAG analysis that the mortality rate in Habré prisons was staggeringly high—much higher than the mortality rate among the population as a whole. Here’s an excerpt from the judgment, page 358 (translated by Google): The statistical expert, Patrick Ball, ...

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 ...

Collaboration between the Colombian Truth Commission, the Special Jurisdiction for Peace, and HRDAG (Dataset)

The Colombian Truth Commission (CEV), the Special Jurisdiction for Peace (JEP), and the Human Rights Data Analysis Group (HRDAG) have worked together to integrate data and calculate statistical estimates of the number of victims of the armed conflict, including homicides, forced disappearances, kidnapping, and the recruitment of child soldiers. Data are available through National Administrative Department of Statistics (DANE), the Truth Commission, and GitHub. Published in 2023.

The Colombian Truth Commission (CEV), the Special Jurisdiction for Peace (JEP), and the Human Rights Data Analysis Group (HRDAG) have worked together to integrate data and calculate statistical estimates of the number of victims of the armed conflict, including homicides, forced disappearances, kidnapping, and the recruitment of child soldiers. Data are available through National Administrative Department of Statistics (DANE), the Truth Commission, and GitHub.


Big data may be reinforcing racial bias in the criminal justice system

Laurel Eckhouse (2017). Big data may be reinforcing racial bias in the criminal justice system. Washington Post. 10 February 2017. © 2017 Washington Post.

Laurel Eckhouse (2017). Big data may be reinforcing racial bias in the criminal justice system. Washington Post. 10 February 2017. © 2017 Washington Post.


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 ...

How Many Peruvians Have Died?

Patrick Ball, Jana Asher, David Sulmont, and Daniel Manrique. “How Many Peruvians Have Died?” © 2003 American Association for the Advancement of Science.


Welcoming our new Technical Lead

After almost two months of searching for the perfect fit, we’re very pleased to announce that Josh Shadlen has joined HRDAG as our new technical lead. Finding Josh was no easy feat. We were looking for what many people would call a “data scientist,” that is, someone with expertise in both computer science and statistics. These days, “data science” is one of the hottest fields out there. Bringing the perfect mix of academic depth and thoughtful reflection, Josh stood out for us. With prior jobs including gigs at Silicon Valley startups and Twitter, he’s got high-level (more…)

The Bosnian Book of the Dead: Assessment of the Database (Full Report).

Patrick Ball, Ewa Tabeau, and Philip Verwimp (2007). “The Bosnian Book of the Dead: Assessment of the Database (Full Report).” Households in Conflict Network Research Design Note 5.


Quantitative Data Analysis and Large-Scale Human Rights Violations: An Example of Applied Statistics at the Grassroots.

Romesh Silva. “Quantitative Data Analysis and Large-Scale Human Rights Violations: An Example of Applied Statistics at the Grassroots.” Gazette of the Australian Mathematical Society. Canberra (Australia). Volume 32, Number 2, May 2005.


Using Cemetery Information in the Search for the Disappeared: Lessons from a Pilot Study in Rionegro, Antioquia

Tamy Guberek, Daniel Guzmán, and Beatriz Vejarano. “Using Cemetery Information in the Search for the Disappeared: Lessons from a Pilot Study in Rionegro, Antioquia.” In Methodological Proposals for Documenting and Searching for Missing Persons in Colombia. (Available in Spanish) © 2010 EQUITAS. All rights reserved.


Preliminary Statistical Analysis of AVCRP & DDS Documents – A report to Human Rights Watch about Chad under the government of Hissène Habré


New publication in BIOMETRIKA

New paper in Biometrika, co-authored by HRDAG's Kristian Lum and James Johndrow: Theoretical limits of microclustering in record linkage.

A geeky deep-dive: database deduplication to identify victims of human rights violations

In our work, we merge many databases to figure out how many people have been killed in violent conflict. Merging is a lot harder than you might think. Many of the database records refer to the same people--the records are duplicated. We want to identify and link all the records that refer to the same victims so that each victim is counted only once, and so that we can use the structure of overlapping records to do multiple systems estimation. Merging records that refer to the same person is called entity resolution, database deduplication, or record linkage. For definitive overviews of the field, see Scheuren, Herzog, and Winkler, Data Quality ...

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 ...

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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