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Colombia Report

Benetech Human Rights Program and Corporación Punto de Vista Issues Report on Sexual Violence in Colombia Researchers Find that Data About Sexual Violence is Difficult To Collect and Subject to Misinterpretation May 2, 2011, Palo Alto, CA — The Benetech Human Rights Program has issued a report with the Colombian NGO Corporación Punto de Vista which examines how quantitative data can be used to assess conflict related sexual violence in Colombia. Written by Francoise Roth, Tamy Guberek and Amelia Hoover Green, Using Quantitative Data to Assess Conflict-Related Sexual Violence in Colombia: Challenges and Opportunities notes that sexual violations ...

Police Violence in Puerto Rico: Flooded with Data

Kilómetro Cero is making a comparison of police killings in Puerto Rico and police killings in the non-territorial United States, and HRDAG is helping to organize the data.

How we make sure that nobody is counted twice: A peek into HRDAG's record de-duplication

HRDAG is currently evaluating the quality and completeness of the Kosovo Memory Book of the Humanitarian Law Center (HLC) in Belgrade, Serbia. The objective of the Kosovo Memory Book (KMB) is to commemorate every single person who fell victim to armed conflict in Kosovo from 1998 to 2000, either through death or disappearance. While building and reviewing their database, one of the things that HLC has to do is “record linkage,” a process also known as “matching.” Matching determines whether two records are the same people (“a match”) or different people (“a non-match”). Matching helps to identify whether two existing records refer ...

Criminality registration and measurement

Patrick Ball and Michael Reed Hurtado. 2016. El registro y la medición de la criminalidad. El problema de los datos faltantes y el uso de la ciencia para producir estimaciones en relación con el homicidio en Colombia, demostrado a partir de un ejemplo: el departamento de Antioquia (2003-2011). Revista Criminalidad, 58 (1): 9-23.

Patrick Ball and Michael Reed Hurtado. 2016. El registro y la medición de la criminalidad. El problema de los datos faltantes y el uso de la ciencia para producir estimaciones en relación con el homicidio en Colombia, demostrado a partir de un ejemplo: el departamento de Antioquia (2003-2011). Revista Criminalidad, 58 (1): 9-23. Criminality registration and measurement. The problem of missing data, and the use of science to produce estimations relating to homicide in Colombia, as demonstrated with an example from one of its administrative and political divisions: the Department of Antioquia (2003-2011).


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.”


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.

Inside Syria’s prisons, where an estimated 17,723 have died since 2011

100x100-cnnExcerpt from the article: The estimate is based on reports from four organizations investigating deaths in Syria from March 15, 2011, to December, 31, 2015. From those cases, the Human Rights Data Analysis Group identified 12,270 cases with sufficient information to confirm the person was killed in detention. Using a statistical method to estimate how many victims they do not yet know about, the group came up with 17,723 cases.


“Surmortalité carcérale” sous Habré

Le statisticien américain Patrick Ball, expert au procès de Hissène Habré, a déclaré vendredi que le taux de mortalité d’opposants tchadiens présumés dans les prisons du régime Habré était encore pire que celui des prisonniers de guerre américains dans les camps japonais.


Analyzing patterns of violence in Colombia using more than 100 databases

The institution’s objectives were to learn the truth about what happened during the armed conflict.

Counting Casualties in Syria

Today the United Nations Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights (OHCHR) released a report prepared by me and my colleagues describing the current state of reported killings in the Syrian Arab Republic from the beginning of the conflict in March 2011 through April 2013.  (UN news release here.) This report is an update of work we published in January 2013.  This updated analysis includes records from eight data sources documenting a total of 92,901 reported killings. Our analysis begins with 263,055 total records reported by the eight data sources that include sufficient identifying information (name, date, and location*) to conduct ...

About Us

Who We Are The Human Rights Data Analysis Group is a non-profit, non-partisan organization that applies rigorous science to the analysis of human rights violations around the world. We are a team with expertise in mathematical statistics, computer science, demography, and social science. We are non-partisan—we do not take sides in political or military conflicts, nor do we advocate any particular political party or government policy. However, we are not neutral: we are always in favor of human rights. We support the protections established in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights, and ...

Estimating the Number of SARS-CoV-2 Infections and the Impact of Mitigation Policies in the United States

James Johndrow, Patrick Ball, Maria Gargiulo, and Kristian Lum. (2020). Estimating the Number of SARS-CoV-2 Infections and the Impact of Mitigation Policies in the United States. Harvard Data Science Review. 24 November, 2020. © The Authors, 2020, CC BY 4.0. https://doi.org/10.1162/99608f92.7679a1ed

James Johndrow, Patrick Ball, Maria Gargiulo, and Kristian Lum. (2020). Estimating the Number of SARS-CoV-2 Infections and the Impact of Mitigation Policies in the United States. Harvard Data Science Review. 24 November, 2020. © The Authors, 2020, CC BY 4.0. https://doi.org/10.1162/99608f92.7679a1ed


Scraping for Pattern: Protecting Immigrant Rights in Washington State

With HRDAG's help, the University of Washington Center for Human Rights team has been able to analyze the scraped text and search for key words such as “jail” in order to gain insight into where immigration arrests are being made.

Welcoming Our 2021-2022 Human Rights and Data Science Intern

Larry Barrett has joined HRDAG as a Human Rights and Data Science Intern until February, 2022.

Measuring the Mortality Consequences of Armed Conflict in Amritsar, India: A New Approach to the Indirect Sampling of Conflict-Related Mortality

Romesh Silva and Jeff Klingner. “Measuring the Mortality Consequences of Armed Conflict in Amritsar, India: A New Approach to the Indirect Sampling of Conflict-Related Mortality.” Poster presented at the Population Association of America 2011 Annual Meeting. © 2011 Benetech. Creative Commons BY-NC-SA.


Drug-Related Killings in the Philippines

Patrick Ball, Sheila Coronel, Mariel Padilla and David Mora (2019). Drug-related killings in the Philippines. Human Rights Data Analysis Group. 26 July 2019. © HRDAG 2019.

Patrick Ball, Sheila Coronel, Mariel Padilla and David Mora (2019). Drug-related killings in the Philippines. Human Rights Data Analysis Group. 26 July 2019. © HRDAG 2019.


HRDAG Retreat 2016

What do you get when you bring seven statisticians, one quantitative political scientist, a writer, a computer scientist, and an administrator together for four days in a vacation rental on California’s Russian River? A lot of code, a technical paper and book chapter revised, another paper started, a great hike in the Redwoods, descriptions of food poisoning and crash landings in war zones, and a lot of talk about feelings. Did I mention feelings? On the first evening of the annual retreat of the Human Rights Data Analysis Group, executive director Megan Price asked us to go around the room and share how we were feeling on arrival. The request ...

Controlled vocabulary

What is a controlled vocabulary? A controlled vocabulary provides the ability to transform information that has been collected on violations, victims, and perpetrators into a countable set of data categories. It is important that this process be done without discarding relevant information and without misrepresenting the collected information. Why is it necessary? The data collected about human rights violations originates from a wide range of information sources – legal case files, newspaper articles, e-mails, faxes, letters, phone conversations, testimonies, interviews, radio and television programs, video clips, and photos. This wide range of ...

Herb Spirer, 1925 – 2018

Herb led and mentored a generation of statisticians working in human rights.

Comments to the article ‘Is Violence Against Union Members in Colombia Systematic and Targeted?


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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