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HRDAG – 25 Years and Counting

Today is a very special day for all of us at HRDAG. This is, of course, the 68th anniversary of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights—but this day also marks our 25th year of using statistical science to support the advancement of human rights. It started 25 years ago, in December 1991, in San Salvador, when Patrick Ball was invited to work with the Salvadoran Lutheran Church to design a database to keep track of human rights abuses committed by the military in El Salvador. That work soon migrated to the NGO Human Rights Commission (CDHES). Fueled by thin beer and pupusas, Patrick dove into the deep world of data from human rights testimonies, ...

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 ...

Our Thoughts on #metoo

Violence against women in all its forms is a human rights violation. Most of our HRDAG colleagues are women, and for us, unfortunately, recent campaigns such as #metoo are unsurprising.

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 ...

Reflections: A Meaningful Partnership between HRDAG and Benetech

I joined the Benetech Human Rights Program at essentially the same time that HRDAG did, coming to Benetech from years of analyzing data for large companies in the transportation, hospitality and retail industries. But the data that HRDAG dealt with was not like the data I was familiar with, and I was fascinated to learn about how they used the data to determine "who did what to whom." Although some of the methodologies were similar to what I had experience with in the for-profit sector, the goals and beneficiaries of the analyses were very different. At Benetech, I was initially predominantly focused on product management for Martus, a free ...

HRDAG Offers New R Package – dga

Much of the work we do at HRDAG involves estimating the number of undocumented deaths using a statistical technique called multiple systems estimation (MSE, described in more detail here). One of our goals is to make this class of methods more broadly available to human rights researchers. In particular, we are finding that Bayesian approaches are extremely valuable for MSE. Accordingly, we are pleased to offer a new R package called dga (“decomposable graphs approach”) that performs Bayesian model averaging for MSE. The main function in this package implements a model created by David Madigan and Jeremy York. This model was designed to ...

Patrick Ball wins the Karl E. Peace Award

Patrick Ball won the Karl E. Peace Award for Outstanding Statistical Contributions for the Betterment of Society at the 2018 Joint Statistical Meeting.

Where Stats and Rights Thrive Together

Everyone I had the pleasure of interacting with enriched my summer in some way.

Update of Iraq and Syria Data in New Paper

This week The Statistical Journal of the IAOS published a new(ish) paper by Megan Price and Patrick Ball. The open-access paper, Selection bias and the statistical patterns of mortality in conflict, is a revisiting and updating of both the Iraq and Syria examples used in an earlier paper, Big Data, Selection Bias, and the Statistical Patterns of Mortality in Conflict, which was published last year inThe SAIS Review of International Affairs (JHU Press, 2014). HRDAG believes that the concerns highlighted by these examples are important for a wide variety of audiences, including both the foreign policy readers reached by The SAIS Review and the ...

100 Women in AI Ethics

We live in very challenging times. The pervasiveness of bias in AI algorithms and autonomous “killer” robots looming on the horizon, all necessitate an open discussion and immediate action to address the perils of unchecked AI. The decisions we make today will determine the fate of future generations. Please follow these amazing women and support their work so we can make faster meaningful progress towards a world with safe, beneficial AI that will help and not hurt the future of humanity.

53. Kristian Lum @kldivergence


Trove to IPFS

IPFS is a peer-to-peer storage network that promotes the resiliency, immutability, and auditability of data. This README explains code written to shepherd the files from janky external USB drives to IPFS.

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.


HRDAG Wins the Rafto Prize

The Rafto Foundation, an international human rights organization, has bestowed the 2021 Rafto Prize to HRDAG for its distinguished work defending human rights and democracy.

Estimating Deaths in Timor-Leste


“El reto de la estadística es encontrar lo escondido”: experto en manejo de datos sobre el conflicto

In this interview with Colombian newspaper El Espectador, Patrick Ball is quoted as saying “la gente que no conoce de álgebra nunca debería hacer estadísticas” (people who don’t know algebra should never do statistics).


Truth Commissioner


Truth Commissioner

From the Guatemalan military to the South African apartheid police, code cruncher Patrick Ball singles out the perpetrators of political violence.


Death rate in Habre jails higher than for Japanese POWs, trial told

Patrick Ball of the California-based Human Rights Data Analysis Group said he had calculated the mortality rate of political prisoners from 1985 to 1988 using reports completed by Habre’s feared secret police.


Media Contact

To speak with the researchers at HRDAG, please fill out the form below. You can search our Press Room by keyword or by year.

Weighting for the Guatemalan National Police Archive Sample: Unusual Challenges and Problems.”

Gary M. Shapiro, Daniel R. Guzmán, Paul Zador, Tamy Guberek, Megan E. Price, Kristian Lum (2009).“Weighting for the Guatemalan National Police Archive Sample: Unusual Challenges and Problems.”In JSM Proceedings, Survey Research Methods Section. Alexandria, VA: American Statistical Association.


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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