Patrick BallWith my friends at the Colombian NGO Dejusticia, @hrdag published an essay about the human right to truth about state violence and the role of inferential statistics in getting closer to that truth. #humanrights #TruthCommission #statistics
Here is my translation of their twitter thread. See the thread here: https://twitter.com/Dejusticia/status/1606007205299249152?s=20&t=ZblW81ZkcYapLCBzhYTnzQ #humanrights #TruthCommission #statistics
Dejusticia on Twitter
“Junto a la organización @hrdag construimos un documento que explica cómo la estadística contribuye a garantizar el derecho a la #verdad, especialmente en su dimensión colectiva. También, abordamos cómo gracias a las estimaciones es posible contribuir a esclarecer pasados atroces:”
To tell the truth. Statistics in the unveiling of patterns of violence.
States have the obligation to guarantee the right to the truth in the face of serious human rights violations. Through statistical methods it is possible to tell the truth that escapes in the information gaps that the databases have about these violations. #humanrights #TruthCommission #statistics
"How many victims were there?" is one of the most difficult questions to solve during a transition. To tell the truth, truth commissions can use statistical methods to estimate the universe of victims and identify patterns of violence. Thread. 1/13
Counting all the victims is impossible: some events may have occurred in distant places or there may be no witnesses, victims may be afraid to report, among other difficulties. 2/13
Faced with this challenge, truth commissions in countries such as Guatemala, South Africa and Colombia have used to statistical methods to overcome two types of information gaps. 3/13
The first information gap is the missing fields and occurs when there is a record of a victim, but information about them or about what happened is missing. For example, we do not know the place, the date of the event or the alleged perpetrator. For this information gap, statistical imputation methods are used, which “complete” the missing values from different techniques. 4/13
The second information gap is missing records. This gap is due to the impossibility of any institution or organization to document all cases of human rights violations. To overcome missing records, multiple system estimation or capture-recapture methods are used. 5/13
Missing records are also known as underreporting and it is a widespread problem. For example, the IACHR has found that truth commissions face “phenomena of underreporting of human rights violations, either due to the lack of reporting by the victims and their relatives or due to the impossibility of… covering the entire territory , among others". 6/13
It is important not to do pattern analysis based on what is observed because this may not be a reflection of reality. This is especially important if one takes into account that the undocumented cases tend to be those that occurred in contexts of marginalization. 7/13
The use of statistics in truth commissions has an impact on human rights. There is an interdependence between the right to the truth, the right to information and the other rights for at least three reasons. 8/13
First, due to the state obligation to produce data. According to the IACHR, data collection must be disaggregated based on "ethnic-racial identification", sexual orientation, and gender identity (...) Likewise, this must be disaggregated based on vulnerability conditions. 9/13
Second, because everybody counts. It is inevitable that the information is incomplete, but this should not lead us to the fatalism of accepting gaps and only partially guaranteeing the right to the truth. 10/13
States are internationally obliged to guarantee the right to the truth and, therefore, to produce or reconstruct information even when it has been stolen or destroyed. 11/13
Third, due to the visibility of undocumented patterns, which can show invisible patterns of violence. 12/13
Do you want to know more about the right to the truth and statistics? Download our most recent publication “To count the truth. Statistics in the unveiling of patterns of violence”. 13/13 https://www.dejusticia.org/como-la-ciencia-y-la-estadistica-pueden-garantizar-el-derecho-a-la-verdad/ #humanrights #TruthCommission #statistics
