Most people have never heard of the Human Rights Data Analysis Group (HRDAG), and its name doesn’t exactly roll off the tongue, but the small nonprofit is well known and widely respected in human rights circles. HRDAG’s work has been used by human rights organizations, truth commissions and international criminal tribunals, and it has been shortlisted for the Nobel Peace Prize.
HRDAG was officially founded in 2013 by Patrick Ball and Megan Price. Ball was doing the work for years before that, first at the American Association for the Advancement of Science and then at the Benetech Initiative, where he hired Price, who had just finished graduate school. Today, Ball is the organization’s director of research and Price is executive director. HRDAG is fiscally sponsored by Community Partners.
Since its founding, HRDAG has tracked human rights violations around the world — from El Salvador and Guatemala to Kosovo, Sri Lanka and South Africa. It also works closer to home, documenting incidents of police misconduct and racial bias in law enforcement in the U.S. According to HRDAG, “Inaccurate statistics can damage the credibility of human rights claims — and that’s why we strive to ensure that statistics about human rights violations are generated with as much rigor and are as scientifically accurate as possible.”
The defence of human rights and the funders that support it — along with those, like HRDAG, working to monitor and analyze human rights abuses — is particularly crucial at the moment, with the Trump administration pulling back from international commitments overseas and challenging civil protections at home. The dismantling of USAID and the administration’s foreign funding freeze have already had dire consequences for NGOs backing human rights, democracy and a free press. As U.S. philanthropy wrestles with how to respond and fill gaps, preserving an up-to-date read on human rights abuses and their toll will be crucial.
HRDAG documents human rights violations by using an evolving methodology to analyze data and information it gathers from its own research and from activists and advocacy groups on the ground. A long list of funders have backed the organization’s work, including the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation, Open Society Foundations, Ford Foundation, The National Endowment for Democracy, Filecoin Foundation for the Decentralized Web, Heising-Simons Foundation, William and Flora Hewlett Foundation, Oak Foundation, Sigrid Rausing Trust and Humanity United, as well as individual donors.
Eric Sears, a director at the MacArthur Foundation who leads the grantmaker’s Technology in the Public Interest program, worked at Human Rights First and Amnesty International before joining MacArthur, and has been following HRDAG’s work for years. According to MacArthur’s grants database, it has provided HRDAG over $2 million since 2015.
“They bring rigorous science to bear to advance human rights accountability,” he said. “The human rights field is full of researchers and practitioners who spend a lot of time documenting human rights violations on the ground, and HRDAG is able to augment that through rigorous scientific methodology to be able to understand with more precision the scope and scale of different kinds of human rights abuses and mass atrocities. They bring a unique perspective and set of expertise and insights that augment a lot of traditional human rights research.”
Death in Syria: HRDAG assesses the toll of the Syrian civil war
One of HRDAG’s projects in recent years has been to calculate the tremendous number of deaths resulting from the conflict in Syria. The United Nations used HRDAG’s analysis when it put the number of estimated civilian deaths between March 2011 to March 2021 at over 300,000.
HRDAG also developed an estimate of the number of people who died in Syrian prisons during that country’s armed conflict in a report published last year. Under President Bashar al-Assad, Syrian prisons were notorious for the scale of the abuse and torture that prisoners endured. Following al-Assad’s ouster late last year, many of those who were arrested are still not accounted for.
Megan Price described the multilevel process the organization employed in its analysis, working with Syrian documentation groups that gathered information from a variety of sources.
“It might be family or other community members,” Price said. “Or a social media post might be the starting point, and then they’ll go look for verification from hospital records. So they have a number of different pieces of information that they rely on, and then they create a list that they share with us. On our end, we get lists of named victims from multiple sources, and we do what’s technically referred to as ‘record linkage’ — we identify multiple records that refer to the same individual, and we integrate all of those lists so we generate the most complete list possible of documented, identifiable victims. Of course, that’s not all victims, because there are many who aren’t identified or whose stories are not documented at all. So we use a mathematical modeling tool called multiple systems estimation to then estimate the total number from that documentation.”
HRDAG was able to gather information from one or more sources on 21,300 victims. Based on those findings, it conducted a statistical estimate to account for victims not documented by any (currently) available sources, and put the total number of deaths in Syrian prisons at approximately 34,000. Price says they will update those figures as more information becomes available.
One of HRDAG’s strengths is the long relationships it maintains with partners around the globe. “HRDAG is notable in that it really develops deep relationships and partnerships and trust with organizations and actors in different parts of the world,” Sears said. “I think they’re unique in the sense that they don’t parachute into a situation and do a project and leave. They tend to stick with organizations and with issues over the long term, and continually help build cases around evidence and documentation to ensure that when the day comes, when accountability is possible, the facts and the evidence are there.”
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Missing in Chicago: HRDAG backs domestic data-gathering
HRDAG likes to share its expertise whenever possible. In one recent case, it worked with Trina Reynolds-Tyler, now the data director at the Invisible Institute in Chicago. The grassroots journalism organization works to hold public institutions accountable, and HRDAG has been a partner for years. In 2019, when Reynolds-Tyler was a graduate student and a fellow at the Institute, she contacted HRDAG.
“Trina reached out to us and said, ‘I’m an investigative journalist, and I want to have a better understanding of how to process and deal with data,’” Price recalled. “So she came and spent a summer with us as a fellow, and then went back to the Invisible Institute.”
Reynolds-Tyler went on to write an in-depth series, in collaboration with senior reporter Sarah Conway at City Bureau, on missing persons cases in Chicago. The series, titled “Missing in Chicago,” explored how police mishandled many missing persons cases, and the disproportionate impact on Black women and girls. In 2024, “Missing in Chicago” won a Pulitzer Prize for Local Reporting.
Applying “new technologies for human rights accountability”
Price would love to see the day when there is no need for HRDAG and other human rights organizations. “We’d like to be out of business; the problem is solved, right?” she said. Sadly, given the current atmosphere of crisis in human rights funding circles as the U.S. pulls back from longstanding funding commitments, that isn’t likely to happen any time soon.
Eric Sears at MacArthur highlighted the need for grantmakers to stay committed over the long haul. “I think that it’s probably more evident than ever why supporting organizations doing this kind of work matters,” he said. “But it mattered 10 years ago, and if we look a decade ahead, I think it will still matter. What I think is really important for the human rights field is the progression of science and technology, and groups like HRDAG are at the forefront of thinking about how to apply new technologies for human rights accountability.”
Given its global remit, HRDAG is a lean organization with an astonishingly small staff. Its communications and development team, for example, consists of a small group of consultants.
“They are heads down doing their work most of the time,” Sears said. “Their work shows up in a lot of really important spaces — whether it’s courtrooms or media reports or in policy discourse and conversations related to human rights and civil rights questions — even if their name isn’t attached to it. Their work speaks for itself.”
