Collecting and Protecting Human Rights Data in Guatemala (1991-2013)
In 1996, a peace accord brokered by the United Nations ended 36 years of internal armed conflict in Guatemala. During the hostilities, non-governmental organizations asked for technical support from the scientific community in the project to gather the experiences of witnesses and victims in databases.
From 1993 to 1999 Dr. Patrick Ball, then at the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS), worked with the International Center for Human Rights Research in Guatemala (CIIDH) to collect and organize evidence of more than 43,000 human rights violations. The ...
Hissène Habré's rule over the former French colony of Chad, from 1982 to 1990, was marked by numerous and credible allegations of systematic torture and crimes against humanity. Habré claims that he was not aware of violations committed by the Documentation and Security Directorate (DDS), the state security force that pursued political opponents and operated notorious prisons during his regime.
In January 2010, the Human Rights Data Analysis Group (HRDAG) released a new study showing that Habré was well informed of the hundreds of deaths that occurred in prisons operated by the DDS. The HRDAG report, State Coordinated Violence in Chad under ...
Text in English
Para evaluar afirmaciones sobre la reducción de la violencia letal en Colombia
En marzo de 2007, el Grupo de Análisis de Datos de Derechos Humanos (HRDAG por sus siglas en inglés) publicó un estudio con el título de "Para Evaluar Afirmaciones Sobre la Reducción de la Violencia Letal en Colombia." Los autores de dicho estudio evaluaron aseveraciones que la violencia en Colombia disminuyó tras la desmovilización de los paramilitares. Demostraron que tales afirmaciones se basan tanto en una sobreinterpretación de datos no ajustados como en inferencias causales infundadas. Los autores concluyeron que se requieren múltip...
Paula Amado has joined as a Research Scholar, and María Juliana Durán Fedullo has joined as a Visiting Scholar.
Administrative paperwork generated by police departments can hold evidence of police violence, but can present unique challenges for data processing.
El objetivo de esta institución temporal es conocer la verdad de lo ocurrido en el marco del conflicto armado.
It took me a while to realize I had become part of the HRDAG incubator—at least that’s what it felt like to me—for young data analysts who wanted to use statistical knowledge to make a real impact on human rights debates.
(This post is co-authored by Patrick Ball and Megan Price)
In a recent article in the SAIS Review of International Affairs, we wrote about "event size bias," the problem that events of different sizes have different probabilities of being reported. In this case, the size of an event is defined by the number of reported victims. Our concern is that not all violent (in this case homicide) events are recorded, that is, some events will have zero sources. Our theory is that events with fewer victims will receive less coverage than events with more victims, and that a higher proportion of small events will have zero sources relative to large events.
The ...
Maria Gargiulo, María Julia Durán, Paula Andrea Amado, and Patrick Ball (2024). verdata: An R package for analyzing data from the Truth Commission in Colombia. The Journal of Open Source Software. 6 January, 2024. 9(93), 5844, https://doi.org/10.21105/joss.05844. Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.
Maria Gargiulo, María Julia Durán, Paula Andrea Amado, and Patrick Ball (2024). verdata: An R package for analyzing data from the Truth Commission in Colombia. The Journal of Open Source Software. 6 January, 2024. 9(93), 5844, https://doi.org/10.21105/joss.05844. Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.
This week, we join our friends and colleagues in feeling horrified by the violence in Charlottesville, Virginia. As we have for the past 26 years, we stand with the victims of violence and support human rights and dignity for all. We spend our careers observing and documenting mass political violence across the world. The demands by the so-called “alt-right” to normalize racism and social exclusion are all too familiar to us.
At HRDAG, our work is always guided by the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR). We reaffirm our commitment to these principles, in particular that the “recognition of the inherent dignity and of the equal and ...
HRDAG + Dejusticia
Abstract: In 2018, Dejusticia and HRDAG published our first report estimating the total number of social leaders killed in Colombia during 2016-2017. Additionally, we demonstrated that a statistical method known as “capture-recapture” could be used to estimate the underreporting of murdered social leaders. Moreover, our estimate closely matched the total documented by the organizations collectively. A year later, we released a second report, updating the data to include 2018. Five years later, we revisited this exercise to cover the period from 2019 to 2023, focusing on three of the original six organizations. Read the article on HRDAG (en español).
Valentina Rozo Ángel and Patrick Ball. 2024. Asesinatos de líderes sociales y defensores de derechos en Colombia: en estimación del universo actualización 2019 – 2023. Human Rights Data Analysis Group. 18 December 2024. © HRDAG 2024.
Creative Commons International license 4.0.
Patrick Ball, César Rodríguez and Valentina Rozo (2018). Asesinatos de líderes sociales en Colombia en 2016–2017: una estimación del universo. Dejusticia and Human Rights Data Analysis Group. August 2018. © 2018 HRDAG. Creative Commons.
Patrick Ball, César Rodríguez and Valentina Rozo (2018). Asesinatos de líderes sociales en Colombia en 2016–2017: una estimación del universo. Dejusticia and Human Rights Data Analysis Group. August 2018. © 2018 HRDAG. Creative Commons.
HRDAG researchers and analysts at Peru's Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC) estimated conflict mortality due to violence using Capture-Recapture methods.
[français]
Hissène Habré was president of the former French colony of Chad from 1982 to 1990. Credible allegations of systematic torture and crimes against humanity have been made against Habré’s state security force, the Documentation and Security Directorate (DDS), which pursued political opponents and operated notorious prisons during his regime.
One prison where the DDS is alleged to have tortured prisoners is the “Piscine,” a former swimming pool covered by a concrete roof. Prisoners were held in ten dank cells where witnesses say they were starved and abused.
After being forced from power in 1990, Habré went into exile ...
