234 results for search: bakideku.blogspot.com/feed/rss2/chad-faqs
Letter from Alejandro Valencia Villa
Alejandro Valencia Villa is a Former Commissioner of the Colombian Truth Commission. (Letter in English, and letter in Spanish.)
Introduction
One of the most obvious and most difficult questions to answer when analyzing an armed conflict is determining the number of victims. In a conflict like Colombia’s, prolonged and with complex characteristics due to the different nature of the armed actors and because they committed a great variety and quantity of human rights violations and breaches of humanitarian law, the challenge is even greater. As if this were not enough, Colombia also had a large number of records of these violations and infract...
HRDAG and the Digital Commons
One of the three main goals of HRDAG is education and outreach, and to that end we use Creative Commons licenses for all of our blogposts and, whenever possible, for our publications. Using a Creative Commons license makes it clear that educators are free to use HRDAG's publications, in their entirety, and with the peace of mind that they are doing so with our blessing.
Also, the use of the Creative Commons license allows us to participate in and encourage the creation of a digital commons, which we feel helps to advance another one of our goals, the creation of knowledge. We feel that it’s important to offer up our publications for use and reuse ...
Dictatorships create a lot of data
Structural Zero Issue 01
Jun 03, 2025
Part One of Our Three Part “Gathering the Data” Series
As a statistician, I spend most days trying to wrangle and analyze massive data sets. The specific data I deal with is documentation of human rights violations. My job is to make sense of data that I know is incomplete and answer questions about the past using statistical analysis and scientific reasoning.
But where does this data come from? How was it generated, and how do human rights advocates and researchers access it and secure it?
To kick off our new newsletter Structural Zero, I’ll be writing a ...
Colombia
Data integration and statistical estimation: A collaboration with the Colombian Truth Commission (CEV) and the Special Jurisdiction for Peace (JEP)
The Colombian government and the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC) guerrilla group reached a Peace Agreement in 2016, which created the Commission for the Clarification of the Truth, Coexistence and Non-Repetition (CEV). The objective of this temporary institution was to discover the truth of what happened in the context of the armed conflict.
2020–2022: The Truth Commission joined with the Special Jurisdiction for Peace (JEP) and HRDAG in the “Joint JEP-CEV-HRDAG data integration and ...
Can the Armed Conflict Become Part of Colombia’s History?
Paula Amado and María Juliana Durán Fedullo reflect on how the Truth Commission may change Colombia’s history, finally officially acknowledging the 50-year conflict and its casualties, and reckoning with who did what to whom.
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
FAQ about the JEP-CEV-HRDAG data integration and statistical estimation project
1. Is there a single source of information about the victims of the armed conflict in Colombia?
No. Colombia has an extensive documentation process for victims of the armed conflict. Hundreds of institutions, victims' organizations, and civil society organizations have focused their efforts on recording this information. However, each entity or organization develops their documentation process with its own limitations related to technical, logistical, social, and missionary capacities. No entity or organization is able to document the complete universe of victims. This is because it is impossible for them to reach every part of the country, ...
Open Source Summit 2018
On October 23, 2018, Patrick Ball keynoted at the Open Source Summit in Edinburgh, Scotland.
HRDAG Retreat 2022
A week in the California redwoods amongst a hodgepodge of people united by their passion for using quantitative analysis to combat injustice.
Violence in Blue
Note from the author (June 2020)
The largest public demonstrations in a generation are at this moment demanding reform or abolition of the police in the United States.[1] The overwhelming and destabilizing violence by police against protesters has been egregiously disproportionate to the threats to property posed by a tiny minority of the demonstrators. Thanks to cell phone video and media coverage, Americans seem to be noticing, and there may be sufficient political momentum for meaningful change.
It is essential in this moment to remember how authorities will respond to this pressure. Always, those authorities will claim that their extraordinary ...
In Colombia: HRDAG and Dejusticia on the Importance of Missing Data
It’s inevitable that databases will have information gaps, and special care must be taken to account for these gaps.
Rionegro
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 ...
HRDAG Testimony in Guatemala Retrials
HRDAG analysis presented by Patrick found that 5 percent of the indigenous Maya Ixil population was killed in a 15-month period.
Guatemala
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 ...
Remembering Scott Weikart
HRDAG’s core values all have a connection to Scott Weikart, 1951–2023.
verdata: An R package for analyzing data from the Truth Commission in Colombia
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.
There may have been 14 undocumented Korean “comfort women” in Palembang, Indonesia
Patrick Ball, Ethan Hee-Seok Shin and Hyerin Yang (2018). There may have been 14 undocumented Korean “comfort women” in Palembang, Indonesia. Human Rights Data Analysis Group. 26 December 2018.© 2018 HRDAG. Creative Commons.
Patrick Ball, Ethan Hee-Seok Shin and Hyerin Yang (2018). There may have been 14 undocumented Korean “comfort women” in Palembang, Indonesia. Human Rights Data Analysis Group. 26 December 2018.© 2018 HRDAG. Creative Commons.
New analysis of World War II Korean “comfort women” held by Japanese
There may have been more undocumented World War II-era Korean "comfort women" than known.
12 Questions about Using Data Analysis to Bring Guatemalan War Criminals to Justice
When people talk about war criminals in Guatemala, which war are they talking about?
They’re talking about the Guatemalan civil war, which began in 1960 and ended in 1996. That’s thirty-six years of civil war. Even though it ended almost two decades ago, Guatemala is still recovering from it. At its simplest, this civil war story was right-wing government forces fighting leftist rebels. But it went deeper than that, of course. The majority of the rebel forces was composed of indigenous peoples, primarily the Maya, (more…)