Patrick Ball


Patrick Ball is a scientist who has spent more than twenty years conducting quantitative analysis for truth commissions, non-governmental organizations, international criminal tribunals, and United Nations missions in El Salvador, Ethiopia, Guatemala, Haiti, South Africa, Chad, Sri Lanka, East Timor, Sierra Leone, South Africa, Kosovo, Liberia, Perú, Colombia, the Democratic Republic of Congo, and Syria. As executive director of Human Rights Data Analysis Group, he assists human rights defenders by conducting rigorous scientific and statistical analysis of large-scale human rights abuses. He received his bachelor of arts degree from Columbia University, and his doctorate from the University of Michigan.

Expert testimony in war crimes trials

Patrick Ball served as an expert witness in testimony at the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia against Slobodan Milosevic, the former President of Serbia. He was also an expert witness for the Prosecution at the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia in Milutinović et al..
In 2013 Ball provided expert 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 found guilty of genocide and crimes against humanity; it was the first time ever 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 provided expert testimony in the trial of former President of Chad, Hissène Habré. HRDAG's analysis showed that the death rate for political prisoners was much higher than for adult men in Chad: 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. During a nine-month period in 1986-1987, the mortality rate in Habré's prisons was higher than that of US POWs in Japanese custody during World War II.

Awards

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 in 2014. Other awards include the Karl E. Peace Award for Outstanding Statistical Contributions for the Betterment of Society from the American Statistical Association in 2018, 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 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, a Fellow at the Human Rights Center at Berkeley Law of the University of California, Berkeley; and a Visiting Fellow at the Institute for Democracy and Conflict Resolution at the University of Essex.

Publications