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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...

FAT* Conference 2018

Kristian Lum spoke about "Understanding the Context and Consequences of Pre-Trial Detention" at the Conference on Fairness, Accountability, and Transparency (FAT*).

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…)

Our Story

Dec 10, 1991 HRDAG is born when Patrick Ball begins database design at the Human Rights Office of the Salvadoran Lutheran Church. The work soon moves to the non-governmental Human Rights Commission (CDHES). The database analysis identified the 100 worst officers in the Salvadoran military — who were forced to resign as part of the peace process. 1994 Patrick publishes A Definit...

Identifiers of Detained Children Have Implications for Data Security and Estimation

Identifiers being sequential could make possible estimations of the population of detained children.

El Salvador

Some of the earliest large-scale human rights information projects happened in El Salvador. One was developed by Patrick Ball at the Salvadoran non-governmental Human Rights Commission, also known as Comision de Derechos Humanos de El Salvador (CDHES-ng). Between 1977 and 1990, more than 9,000 testimonies were taken in an effort to document the nature and scope of the bloody conflict between the army and the Farabundo Marti National Liberation Front (FMLN). Starting in 1991, Patrick worked with CDHES staff to organize the information in an early computer database. They linked reported human rights violations with the career structures of individual ...

Layers of Bias: A Unified Approach for Understanding Problems With Risk Assessment

Laurel Eckhouse, Kristian Lum, Cynthia Conti-Cook and Julie Ciccolini (2018). Layers of Bias: A Unified Approach for Understanding Problems With Risk Assessment. Criminal Justice and Behavior. November 23, 2018. © 2018 Sage Journals. All rights reserved. https://doi.org/10.1177/0093854818811379

Laurel Eckhouse, Kristian Lum, Cynthia Conti-Cook and Julie Ciccolini (2018). Layers of Bias: A Unified Approach for Understanding Problems With Risk Assessment. Criminal Justice and Behavior. November 23, 2018. © 2018 Sage Journals. All rights reserved. https://doi.org/10.1177/0093854818811379


Estimating the Number of SARS-CoV-2 Infections and the Impact of Mitigation Policies in the United States

James Johndrow, Patrick Ball, Maria Gargiulo, and Kristian Lum. (2020). Estimating the Number of SARS-CoV-2 Infections and the Impact of Mitigation Policies in the United States. Harvard Data Science Review. 24 November, 2020. © The Authors, 2020, CC BY 4.0. https://doi.org/10.1162/99608f92.7679a1ed

James Johndrow, Patrick Ball, Maria Gargiulo, and Kristian Lum. (2020). Estimating the Number of SARS-CoV-2 Infections and the Impact of Mitigation Policies in the United States. Harvard Data Science Review. 24 November, 2020. © The Authors, 2020, CC BY 4.0. https://doi.org/10.1162/99608f92.7679a1ed


Full Updated Statistical Analysis of Documentation of Killings in the Syrian Arab Republic

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]


Updated Statistical Analysis of Documentation of Killings in the Syrian Arab Republic

Megan Price, Anita Gohdes, and Patrick Ball (2014). Human Rights Data Analysis Group, commissioned by the United Nations Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights (OHCHR). August 22, 2014. © 2014 HRDAG. Creative Commons BY-NC-SA.


Learning Day by Day: Quantitative Research at the AHPN

Working at the Historic Archive of the National Police (AHPN) of Guatemala, there are many skills I learned on the job. My many years of work on the team that studies the recovered documents have been like a custom-made course in how to do quantitative research. The Archive documents I study are the result of 36 years of creation during civil war (1960 to 1996). Many of these documents are simply administrative—but we are able to use them to understand patterns that occurred during the conflict, to get a sense of what mattered to the National Police and what didn’t. Our quantitative research shows us the Police behavior in broad strokes. ...

HRDAG Retreat 2018

What follows is an elaborate criss-crossing of collaborations—retreat is a time to embrace the productivity that comes with being in the same room.

The Devil is in the Details: Interrogating Values Embedded in the Allegheny Family Screening Tool

Anjana Samant, Noam Shemtov, Kath Xu, Sophie Beiers, Marissa Gerchick, Ana Gutierrez, Aaron Horowitz, Tobi Jegede, Tarak Shah (2023). The Devil is in the Details: Interrogating Values Embedded in the Allegheny Family Screening Tool. ACLU. Summer 2023.

Anjana Samant, Noam Shemtov, Kath Xu, Sophie Beiers, Marissa Gerchick, Ana Gutierrez, Aaron Horowitz, Tobi Jegede, Tarak Shah (2023). The Devil is in the Details: Interrogating Values Embedded in the Allegheny Family Screening Tool. ACLU. Summer 2023.


How many people are infected with Covid-19?

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.


Chad – FAQs

State Coordinated Violence in Chad under Hissène Habré -- [Français]      

.Rproj Considered Harmful

We aim to produce code that is clear, replicatable across machines and operating systems, and that leaves an easy-to-follow audit trail.

Analysis of Homicide Patterns in Colombia

Last week Forensis, the Colombian National Institute of Forensic Medicine’s flagship publication, published the first of our analyses of homicide patterns in Colombia. Authored by HRDAG executive director Patrick Ball and UN colleague Michael Reed Hurtado, “Cuentas y mediciones de la criminalidad y de la violencia” (pages 529-545) explores, as the title suggests, the quality of “truth” contained within crime registries. Citing the problem of partial data, missing data, and inherent design bias, Patrick and Michael write that no register, official or unofficial, can present a true reflection of what has really happened. This publication...

Reflections: Richard Savage’s Vision Fulfilled

In 1984, as a fresh PhD, I heard Richard Savage give his presidential address at the Joint Statistical Meetings in Philadelphia. He called it "Hard/Soft Problems" and made a big pitch for statisticians to get involved in human rights data analysis. It was inspirational, and I was immediately sold. I started working with the American Statistical Association's Committee on Scientific Freedom and Human Rights (now chaired by HRDAG's own Megan Price). Over time, a growing set of statisticians became involved, initially in letter-writing campaigns to help dissident statisticians (and other quantitative academics—economists seemed to have a particular ...

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.


Celebrating Ten Years of Data from the AHPN

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, ...

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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