Kevin Uhrmacher of the Washington Post prepared a graph that illustrates reported deaths over time, by number of organizations reporting the deaths.
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Today we’re very pleased to hear of the verdict finding Hissène Habré guilty of crimes against humanity. Habré, president of Chad from 1982 to 1990, has been sentenced to life in prison in Dakar, Senegal, where he was tried. He is the first former head of state to be tried and found guilty of crimes against humanity in one country (Chad) by the courts of another country (Senegal). Here’s more on the verdict from The Guardian.
The verdict resonates especially with HRDAG because of our role in the trial. In September 2015, director of research Patrick Ball testified as an expert witness about the very high rates of prison mortality in ...
The modular nature of the workflow and use of Git allowed us to work on different parts of the project from across the country.
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 ...
Ten years ago, in July 2005, human rights officers stumbled upon a nondescript warehouse in a commercial zone of Guatemala City and changed history. They had discovered an archive–its existence kept secret–belonging to the Guatemalan National Police, whose officers committed human rights atrocities on behalf of the government during the civil war.
Inside the building was the bureaucratic detritus typical of a large government agency: 80 million pages detailing shifts worked, tasks assigned, assignments fulfilled, workers’ whereabouts, and who was supervising whom. The documents, which were found stacked on dirty floors, shoved into bags, ...
“Revolution Analytics will allow HRDAG to handle bigger data sets and leverage the power of R to accomplish this goal and uncover the truth.” Director of Research Megan Price is quoted
Ayyub Ibrahim, Huy Dao, and Tarak Shah (2024). “Innocence Discovery Lab - Harnessing Large Language Models to Surface Data Buried in Wrongful Conviction Case Documents." The Wrongful Conviction Law Review 5 (1):103-25. https://doi.org/10.29173/wclawr112. 31 May, 2024. Copyright (c) 2024 Ayyub Ibrahim, Huy Dao, Tarak Shah. Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.
Ayyub Ibrahim, Huy Dao, and Tarak Shah (2024). “Innocence Discovery Lab – Harnessing Large Language Models to Surface Data Buried in Wrongful Conviction Case Documents.” The Wrongful Conviction Law Review 5 (1):103-25. https://doi.org/10.29173/wclawr112. 31 May, 2024. Copyright (c) 2024 Ayyub Ibrahim, Huy Dao, Tarak Shah. Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.
Solving for X documents Patrick's team as they travel to Guatemala, Kosovo, and Liberia, helping human rights supporters apply sophisticated computer analysis to human rights events.
“Usually, the thing you’re trying to predict in a lot of these cases is something like rearrest,” Lum said. “So even if we are perfectly able to predict that, we’re still left with the problem that the human or systemic or institutional biases are generating biased arrests. And so, you still have to contextualize even your 100 percent accuracy with is the data really measuring what you think it’s measuring? Is the data itself generated by a fair process?”
HRDAG Director of Research Patrick Ball, in agreement with Lum, argued that it’s perhaps more practical to move it away from bias at the individual level and instead call it bias at the institutional or structural level. If a police department, for example, is convinced it needs to police one neighborhood more than another, it’s not as relevant if that officer is a racist individual, he said.
Text in English
El uso de información de cementerios en la búsqueda de los desaparecidos: lecciones de un estudio piloto en Rionegro, Antioquia, Colombia
Entre mayo y julio de 2009, investigadores del Grupo de Análisis de Datos de Derechos Humanos de Benetech (HRDAG por su sigla en inglés), condujeron un estudio piloto que examinó los patrones de la información sobre los cadáveres sin identificar en el cementerio de Rionegro, un municipio en el departamento de Antioquia, Colombia. El estudio se realizó en apoyo a los actuales esfuerzos de la organización socia de HRDAG, EQUITAS (Equipo Colombiano Interdisciplinario de Trabajo Forense y ...
Price, Megan, Jeff Klingner, Anas Qtiesh, and Patrick Ball. 2013. Commissioned by the United Nations Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights (OHCHR). Human Rights Data Analysis Group (June 13). © 2013 HRDAG. Creative Commons BY-NC-SA. [pdf via UN]
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 ...
Tarak Shah (2020). How many people are infected with Covid-19? Significance. 09 April 2020. © 2020 The Royal Statistical Society.
Tarak Shah (2020). How many people are infected with Covid-19? Significance. 09 April 2020. © 2020 The Royal Statistical Society.
Megan Price and Maria Gargiulo (2021). Lies, Damned Lies, and "Official" Statistics. Health and Human Rights Journal. 24 June, 2021. © Health and Human Rights Journal.
Megan Price and Maria Gargiulo (2021). Lies, Damned Lies, and “Official” Statistics. Health and Human Rights Journal. 24 June, 2021. © Health and Human Rights Journal.
Doing an investigation on the contents of the Archive brought with it three major lessons. The first big lesson was the constant movement (nothing was static), The second great lesson was that everything evolved (the changes were a constant). The third major lesson was to discover how two institutions can work together while geographically far apart.
The constant movement
As there were other processes being carried out at the Archive, everything was in constant movement. In other words, one day the documents were in X location and tomorrow they may be in location Y or dispersed in multiple locations. This made it impossible to know with certai...