Patrick Ball (born June 26, 1965) is an American statistician known for his quantitative analysis of human rights violations. He has provided statistical analysis for truth commissions, non-governmental organizations, international criminal tribunals, and United Nations missions. As director of research at the Human Rights Data Analysis Group, he conducts statistical analyses to document patterns of human rights abuses.
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Education
Ball earned a Bachelor of Arts degree from Columbia University, and a doctorate from the University of Michigan in 1998.
Human rights and cryptography export controls
In the 1990s, Ball advocated for the availability of cryptographic technology amid the debates over its export by U.S. software developers.
In 1993, he began working with the Science and Human Rights Program of the AAAS, 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. 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.
In 1997, Ball provided testimony in ACLU v. Miller, a case from the civil liberties group challenging a Georgia law barring online pseudonymity as unconstitutionally vague and overbroad.
Expert testimony in war crimes trials
Ball testified at the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia against Slobodan Milosevic. He also testified as 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. 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. 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.
Awards
Patrick Ball was awarded the John Maddox Prize in 2024 by the Nature Awards and Sense About Science for his work in identifying, cataloguing and prosecuting war crimes using statistical and mathematical modeling. In 2018, the American Statistical Association gave 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. 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.
Selected publications
Amelia Hoover Green and Patrick Ball (2019). Civilian killings and disappearances during civil war in El Salvador (1980–1992). Demographic Research, 1 October 2019.
Patrick Ball and Megan Price (2019). Using Statistics to Assess Lethal Violence in Civil and Inter-State War. Annual Review of Statistics and Its Application. 7 March 2019.
Patrick Ball and Megan Price (2018). The Statistics of Genocide. Chance (special issue). February 2018.
Patrick Ball (2016). The case against a golden key. Foreign Affairs. September 14, 2016. Foreign Affairs.
Patrick Ball (2016). Violence in blue. Granta 134: 4 March 2016.
Patrick Ball (2016). Why Just Counting the Dead in Syria Won’t Bring Them Justice. Foreign Policy. October 19, 2016.
Megan Price and Patrick Ball (2014). Big Data, Selection Bias, and the Statistical Patterns of Mortality in Conflict. SAIS Review of International Affairs.
Price, Megan, Jeff Klingner, and Patrick Ball (2013). Preliminary Statistical Analysis of Documentation of Killings in the Syrian Arab Republic, The Benetech Human Rights Program, commissioned by the United Nations Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights (OHCHR).
Patrick Ball. When It Comes to Human Rights, There Are No Online Security Shortcuts, Wired op-ed, August 10, 2012.
Patrick Ball (2008). “¿Quién le hizo qué a quién? Planear e implementar un proyecto a gran escala de información en derechos humanos.” (originally in English at AAAS) Translated by Beatriz Verjerano. Palo Alto, California: Benetech.