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Patrick Ball | |
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Born | June 26, 1965 |
Alma mater | Columbia University University of Michigan |
Occupation | Scientist |
Employer | Human Rights Data Analysis Group |
Known for | Human Rights Stats |
Title | Director of Research |
Patrick Ball (born June 26, 1965) is an American scientist specializing in quantitative analysis of large-scale human rights abuses. He has carried out work for truth commissions, non-governmental organizations, and international criminal tribunals as well as United Nations missions in El Salvador, Ethiopia, Guatemala, Haiti, South Africa, Chad, Sri Lanka, East Timor, Sierra Leone, Kosovo, Liberia, Peru, Colombia, the Democratic Republic of Congo, and Syria. As Director of Research at the Human Rights Data Analysis Group, he carries out statistical and scientific analyses to assist human rights defenders in documenting and understanding patterns of abuse.
Ball received his bachelor of arts degree from Columbia University, [1] and his doctorate from the University of Michigan.
During the 1990s-era controversies over the export of strong cryptography by United States software developers, Ball's technical background in human rights conflicts directed him to advocate for the widespread availability of cryptographic technology. [2] [3]
In 1993, he began working with the Science and Human Rights Program of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, initially as a consultant and eventually as deputy director. His work with the AAAS included traveling to El Salvador and Ethiopia to train local human rights organizations on the use of cryptography and the Internet to protect their communications. [4] The Science and Human Rights Program also organized or co-organized symposiums, including a congressional briefing at which Ball presented alongside Matt Blaze, Ian Goldberg, and Dinah PoKempner. [5]
In 1997, Ball provided testimony in ACLU v. Miller , [6] a case from the civil liberties group challenging a Georgia law barring online pseudonymity as unconstitutionally vague and overbroad. [7]
Ball served as a witness in testimony at the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia against Slobodan Milosevic, the former President of Serbia. He was also a witness for the Prosecution at the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia in Milutinović et al. (IT-05-87).
In 2013, Ball provided testimony in Guatemala's Supreme Court in the trial of General José Efraín Ríos Montt, the de facto president of Guatemala in 1982-1983. Ríos was convicted of genocide and crimes against humanity, marking the first time in history that a former head of state was found guilty of genocide in his own country. Ball also testified in 2013 in the trial of Guatemala's former national police chief, Héctor Rafael Bol de la Cruz, who was sentenced to 40 years in prison for the disappearance of a student union leader.
In September 2015, Ball testified in the trial of former President of Chad, Hissène Habré. The analysis from HRDAG revealed that the death rate for political prisoners was significantly higher than that of adult men in Chad, ranging from 90 to 540 times higher. On its worst day in the time period for which data were analyzed, the mortality rate was 2.37 deaths per 100 prisoners. Notably, during a nine-month span from 1986 to 1987, the mortality rate in Habré's prisons surpassed that of U.S. POWs held by the Japanese during World War II.
In 2024, the Nature Awards John Maddox Prize, in partnership with Sense About Science, awarded Patrick Ball the John Maddox Prize for his outstanding work in identifying, cataloguing and prosecuting war crimes using rigorous statistical and mathematical modeling. In 2018, the American Statistical Association gave Patrick Ball the Karl E Peace Award for Outstanding Statistical Contributions for the Betterment of Society. Ball was conferred a Doctor of Science honoris causa by Claremont Graduate University in 2015. In 2014, he was named a Fellow by the American Statistical Association. [8] Other awards include the Pioneer Award from the Electronic Frontier Foundation in 2005, the Eugene L. Lawler Award for Humanitarian Contributions within Computer Science from the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) in June 2004, and a Special Achievement Award from the Social Statistics Section of the American Statistical Association in 2002. He is a Research Fellow at the Carnegie Mellon University Center for Human Rights Science, and a Fellow at the Human Rights Center at Berkeley Law of the University of California, Berkeley.
José Manuel Ramos-Horta GCL GColIH is an East Timorese politician. He has been the president of East Timor since 2022, having previously also held the position from 20 May 2007 to 20 May 2012. Previously he was Minister of Foreign Affairs from 2002 to 2006 and Prime Minister from 2006 to 2007. He was a co-recipient of the 1996 Nobel Peace Prize, along with Carlos Filipe Ximenes Belo, for working "towards a just and peaceful solution to the conflict in East Timor".
Rigoberta Menchú Tum is a K'iche' Guatemalan human rights activist, feminist, and Nobel Peace Prize laureate. Menchú has dedicated her life to publicizing the rights of Guatemala's Indigenous peoples during and after the Guatemalan Civil War (1960–1996), and to promoting Indigenous rights internationally.
Iraq Body Count project (IBC) is a web-based effort to record civilian deaths resulting from the US-led 2003 invasion of Iraq. Included are deaths attributable to coalition and insurgent military action, sectarian violence and criminal violence, which refers to excess civilian deaths caused by criminal action resulting from the breakdown in law and order which followed the coalition invasion. As of February 2019, the IBC has recorded 183,249 – 205,785 civilian deaths. The IBC has a media-centered approach to counting and documenting the deaths. Other sources have provided differing estimates of deaths, some much higher. See Casualties of the Iraq War.
In 1994 Guatemala's Commission for Historical Clarification - La Comisión para el Esclarecimiento Histórico (CEH) - was created as a response to the thousands of atrocities and human rights violations committed during the decades long civil war that began in 1962 and ended in the late 1990s with United Nations-facilitated peace accords. The commission operated under a two-year mandate, from 1997 to 1999, and employed three commissioners: one Guatemalan man, one male non-national, and one Mayan woman. The mandate of the commission was not to judge but to clarify the past with "objectivity, equity and impartiality."
Benetech is a nonprofit social enterprise organization that empowers communities with software for social good. Previous projects include the Route 66 Literacy Project, the Miradi environmental project management software, Martus, and the Human Rights Data Analysis Group. Current program areas include global education, human rights, and poverty alleviation.
The Commission for Reception, Truth and Reconciliation in East Timor was an independent truth commission established in East Timor in 2001 under the UN Transitional Administration in East Timor (UNTAET) and charged to “inquire into human rights violations committed on all sides, between April 1974 and October 1999, and facilitate community reconciliation with justice for those who committed less serious offenses.” The idea of a truth commission in East Timor was first agreed by the National Council of Timorese Resistance in 2000.
The following is a timeline of probability and statistics.
The Human Rights Data Analysis Group is a non-profit, non-partisan organization that applies rigorous science to the analysis of human rights violations around the world. It was founded in 1991 by Patrick Ball. The organization has published findings on conflicts in Syria, Colombia, Chad, Kosovo, Guatemala, Peru, East Timor, India, Liberia, Bangladesh, and Sierra Leone. The organization provided testimony in the war crimes trials of Slobodan Milošević and Milan Milutinović at the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia, and in Guatemala's Supreme Court in the trial of General José Efraín Ríos Montt, the de facto president of Guatemala in 1982–1983. Gen. Ríos was found guilty of genocide and crimes against humanity. Most recently, the organization has published on police violence in the United States.
The Guatemalan genocide, also referred to as the Maya genocide, or the Silent Holocaust, was the mass killing of the Maya Indigenous people during the Guatemalan Civil War (1960–1996) by successive Guatemalan military governments that first took power following the CIA instigated 1954 Guatemalan coup d'état. Massacres, forced disappearances, torture and summary executions of guerrillas and especially civilians at the hands of security forces had been widespread since 1965, and was a longstanding policy of the military regime. Human Rights Watch (HRW) has documented "extraordinarily cruel" actions by the armed forces, mostly against civilians.
Truth-seeking processes allow societies to examine and come to grips with past crimes and atrocities and prevent their future repetition. Truth-seeking often occurs in societies emerging from a period of prolonged conflict or authoritarian rule. The most famous example to date is the South African Truth and Reconciliation Commission, although many other examples also exist. Most commonly these are carried out by official truth and reconciliation commissions as a form of restorative justice, but there are other mechanisms as well.
In July 2005, in an abandoned warehouse in downtown Guatemala City, Guatemala, delegates from the country's Institution of the Procurator for Human Rights uncovered, by sheer chance, a vast archive detailing the history of the defunct National Police and its role in the Guatemalan Civil War. Over five rooms full of files containing names, address, identity documents, were brought to light.
Haiti's National Truth and Justice Commission began its operations in April 1995 and ended in February 1996. The country's once diverse and lively civil society had been tarnished greatly as a result of the ousting of its first democratically elected president, Jean-Bertrand Aristide, by its military forces. This deposing of President Aristide is widely known as a coup d'état, and from 1991 to 1994, the country became known for its weak civilian government. The army was determined to return Haiti to the intimidated society existing during the Duvalier dictatorship seven years prior.
The East Timor genocide refers to the "pacification campaigns" of state terrorism which were waged by the Indonesian New Order government during the Indonesian invasion and occupation of East Timor. The majority of sources consider the Indonesian killings in East Timor to constitute genocide, while other scholars disagree on certain aspects of the definition.
Peru's Truth and Reconciliation Commission was a truth and reconciliation commission established by President Alejandro Toledo to investigate the human rights abuses committed during the internal conflict in Peru between 1980s and 1990s. The TRC was a response to the violent internal conflict between 1980 and 2000 during the administration of Presidents Fernando Belaúnde (1980–1985), Alan García (1985–1990), and Alberto Fujimori (1990–2000). The commission's mandate was to provide a record of human rights and international humanitarian law violations committed in Peru between May 1980 and November 2000, as well as recommend mechanisms to promote and strengthen human rights. The TRC reported on the estimated 70 000 deaths, assassinations, torture, disappearances, displacement, employment of terrorist methods and other human rights violations executed by the State, Shining Path, and the Túpac Amaru Revolutionary Movement. The report concluded that there is both institutional and individual accountability, as well as identifying racial and cultural factors that became a catalyst for conflict.
Megan E. Price is Executive Director of the Human Rights Data Analysis Group. She collects and analyses data to investigate violations to human rights.
Casualty recording is the systematic and continuous process of documenting individual direct deaths from armed conflict or widespread violence. It aims to create a comprehensive account of all deaths within a determined scope, usually bound by time and location.
Erin H. Kimmerle is an American forensic anthropologist, artist, and executive director of the Institute of Forensic Anthropology & Applied Science at the University of South Florida. She was awarded the 2020 AAAS Award for Scientific Freedom and Responsibility.
The President B. J. Habibie Bridge is a two-lane road bridge in the suco of Bidau Santana, an inner suburb of Dili, capital city of East Timor. It is named after B. J. Habibie, the President of Indonesia who decided in 1999 to hold that year's referendum on whether East Timor would become independent of Indonesia.
Sharon Nell DeWitte is an American bioarchaeologist. She is a professor in the Department of Anthropology at the University of Colorado Boulder and a Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science. Her research interests include the Black Death.
Susan M. Hinkins is a retired American government and survey statistician who has worked for the Internal Revenue Service, the United States Environmental Protection Agency, Ernst & Young, NORC at the University of Chicago, and multiple human rights organizations.