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Sri Lanka

Ten years after the war ended in Sri Lanka, we still don’t know to the nearest ten thousand how many people perished. The estimates for the death toll for the last five months of the war alone vary between 7000 and 147,000. In 2011, the UN said it thought approximately 40,000 civilians had died; then in 2012 an internal UN report estimated it was at least 70,000. Population data from World Bank and UN sources indicated that more than 100,000 Tamils living in the conflict areas in the north have not returned home after the war. HRDAG has provided technical assistance to a broad range of non-governmental human rights organizations in Sri ...

The Truth of Truth Commissions: Comparative Lessons from Haiti, South Africa, and Guatemala.

Audrey Chapman and Patrick Ball. “The Truth of Truth Commissions: Comparative Lessons from Haiti, South Africa, and Guatemala.” Human Rights Quarterly. 23(4):1-42. 2001


Casanare, Colombia

Estimates of Killings and Disappearances in Casanare Casanare is a large, rural department or state in Colombia that includes 19 municipalities and a population of almost 300,000 inhabitants. Located in the foothills of the Andes and on the eastern plains, Casanare has a history of violence. Multiple armed groups have operated in Casanare including paramilitaries, guerillas and the Colombian military. Many Casanare citizens have suffered violent deaths and disappearances. But how many people have been killed or disappeared? For reasons of policy, accountability and historical clarification, this question deserves a valid answer. In February ...

Report on Measures of Fairness in NYC Risk Assessment Tool

The report tries to answer the question of whether a particular risk assessment model reinforces racial inequalities in the criminal justice system.

Hissène Habré, le Pinochet Africain


The impact of overbooking on a pre-trial risk assessment tool

Kristian Lum, Chesa Boudin and Megan Price (2020). The impact of overbooking on a pre-trial risk assessment tool. FAT* '20: Proceedings of the 2020 Conference on Fairness, Accountability, and Transparency. January 2020. Pages 482–491. https://doi.org/10.1145/3351095.3372846 ©ACM, Inc., 2020.

Kristian Lum, Chesa Boudin and Megan Price (2020). The impact of overbooking on a pre-trial risk assessment tool. FAT* ’20: Proceedings of the 2020 Conference on Fairness, Accountability, and Transparency. Pages 482–491. https://doi.org/10.1145/3351095.3372846 ©ACM, Inc., 2020.


IN THE FACE OF TYRANNY Taking a Stand as Data Scientists As human rights data analysts, we center our moral understanding on the values of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. We believe that "recognition of the inherent dignity and of the equal and inalienable rights of all members of the human family is the foundation of freedom, justice and peace in the world," as the Declaration's preamble states. This is our guide, and these are our values. For thirty-five years, this has meant using our skills as statisticians and programmers to help other people in their campaigns for truth and justice. When a doctor sees a sick or injured person, they ...

HRDAG Retreat 2014

Ten data nerds gathered in a large hilltop beach house to analyze counts of killings from several war-torn countries. The time was January 16-20, 2014, the place was near San Francisco, the agenda was packed, and I was excited to be there. Having defended my dissertation at Carnegie Mellon University just days before, I had often supposed that my thesis on a generalization of log-linear models for capture-recapture might serve little other purpose than to fill a line on my curriculum vitae. This perception faded after a mid-2013 discussion with Patrick convinced me that HRDAG's data challenges could easily be the best match to my research ...

Overbooking’s Impact on Pre-Trial Risk Assessment Tools

How do police officer booking decisions affect tools relied upon by judges?

Timor-Leste Op-Ed

Defending Human Rights Data And The Possibility of Justice In East Timor By Patrick Ball and Romesh Silva On June 5th, armed gangs broke into the offices of the Commission for Reception, Truth and Reconciliation (CAVR) in Dili, East Timor and stole their motorbikes. Many human rights workers wondered whether the mobs would soon return to loot the irreplaceable paper records used by the CAVR to compile a definitive report on human rights abuses during the Indonesian occupation of East Timor from 1975-1999. The release of this report was preempted by the recent violence in Dili. But in the midst of the chaos, Australian military forces stepped in to ...

Free Software

Patrick Ball (2005). “Free Software,” in The Encyclopedia of Science, Technology, and Ethics. ed. by Carl Mitcham. Farmington Hills, MI: Thomson Gale.


Convenience Samples: What they are, and what they should (and should not) be used for

As noted on our Core Concepts page, we spend a lot of time worrying about the ways data are used to make claims about human rights violations.  This is because inaccurate statistics can damage the credibility of human rights claims.  Analyses of records of human rights violations are used to guide policy decisions, determine resource allocation for interventions, and inform transitional justice mechanisms.  It is vital that such analyses are accurate. Unfortunately, all too often these decisions are based, inappropriately, on analyses of a single convenience sample. (more…)

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 ...

Martus – Paramilitary Protection for Activists


Activist Combines Human Rights and Data Technology


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 Predictive Policing Reinforces Bias

Algorithmic tools like PredPol were supposed to reduce bias. But HRDAG has found that racial bias is baked into the data used to train the tools.

Protecting the Privacy of Whistle-Blowers: The Staten Island Files

HRDAG built a machine-learning tool to strip the raw data of any potentially identifying information such as names and court case numbers. There was no "acceptable error rate."

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.

Killings of Social Movement Leaders in Colombia

Using multiple system estimation, we estimate the total population of social movement leaders killed in Colombia during 2018.

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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