State Coordinated Violence in Chad under Hissène Habré -- [Français]
Patrick Ball. “Making the Case: The Role of Statistics in Human Rights Reporting.” Statistical Journal of the United Nations Economic Commission for Europe. 18(2-3):163-174. 2001.
An excerpt: The “It breaks the human” report released by the human rights group Amnesty International highlights new statistics from the Human Rights Data Analysis Group, or HRDAG, an organization that uses scientific approaches to analyze human rights violations.
In this video, Trina Reynolds-Tyler of Invisible Institute talks about her work with HRDAG on the missing persons project in Chicago and Beneath the Surface.
How do scientists and statisticians stand up to authoritarianism, especially when it happens in their home countries?
At HRDAG, 2021 was all about service and partnership.
In 2023, HRDAG continued to learn from our partners about resilience and patience.
So much of what I learned at HRDAG was intangible, and I'm grateful to have been able to go deep.
I've been working with various projects in Guatemala to document mass violence since 1993, so in 2011, when Claudia Paz y Paz asked me to revisit the analysis I did for the Commission for Historical Clarification examining the differential mortality rates due to homicide for indigenous and non-indigenous people in the Ixil region, I was delighted. We have far better data processing and statistical methods than we had in 1998, plus much more data. I think the resulting analysis is a conservative lower bound on total homicides of indigenous people. (more…)
Access to the records contained in archives is a concern shared by many. Archives support memory and free access to them strengthens democratic processes. Everyone should be allowed to see first-hand the records contained in an archive and be free to interpret them as needed.
Access to archives can increase knowledge on various topics and opens opportunities for different fields of knowledge. (more…)
HRDAG’s funding comes from private, international donors: the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation, Open Society Foundations, an anonymous U.S.-based private foundation, Ford Foundation, The National Endowment for Democracy and individual donors. This funding supports both specific projects, as well as our scientific work generally in human rights data analysis.
For the entirety of its existence, HRDAG has been a project of non-profit organizations, first at the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS), and then at Benetech, a non-profit Silicon Valley technology company. In February 2013, HRDAG ...
Una investigación de Dejusticia y Human Rights Data Analysis Group asegura que en Colombia hay un subregistro de los asesinatos de líderes sociales que se han perpetrado en Colombia. Al analizar las diferentes cifras de homicidios que han publicado diversas organizaciones desde 2016, se llegó a la conclusión que la problemática es mayor de lo que se cree.
2021 Rafto Prize Videos
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2026
11 February 2026 - Structural Zero 08: Yes, Your Dataset is Probably Biased
2025
18 December, 2025 - Community and collaboration
10 December, 2025 - Standing against authoritarianism on Human Rights Day
10 December 2025 - Structural Zero 07: All of the ways we remember: How data scientists hold memory with and for survivors
25 November, 2025 - Structural Zero 06: The Data are Clear: Public Engagement Improves AI Science
14 November, 2025 - Analyzing Chicago's missing person cases
21 October, 2025 - HRDAG takes a stand against tyranny
9 October, 2025 - Unlocking unstructured data and getting it right
30 September, ...
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 ...
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.
[popup citation="For migrations: Ball, Patrick. (2000). AAAS/ Human Rights Data Analysis Group database of migrations in Albania and Kosovo. For killings: Patrick Ball, Wendy Betts, Fritz Scheuren, Jana Dudukovich, and Jana Asher. (2002). AAAS/ABA-CEELI/Human Rights Data Analysis Group database of killings in Kosovo. For other data: Human Rights Data Analysis Group. (2002). Database of NATO airstrikes, geographic coding, and KLA activity in Kosovo."]
The data on migration from Kosovo are in seven files. All of the files are comma-delimited ASCII. The fields in each file are described below. For more information, see Policy or Panic, section A1, pp. ...