Patrick Ball

Patrick Ball (born June 26, 1965) is a scientist who has spent more than thirty 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, Peru, Colombia, the Democratic Republic of Congo, and Syria.

As director of research at 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.

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.

During the 1990s-era controversies over the export of strong cryptography by United States software developers, Ball's technical background in human rights conflicts led him to advocate for the widespread availability of cryptographic technology.

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 countries such as 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 numerous symposiums, including a congressional briefing at which Ball presented alongside Matt Blaze, Ian Goldberg, and Dinah PoKempner.

In 1997, Ball provided expert testimony in ACLU v. Miller, a case from the civil liberties group challenging a Georgia law barring online pseudonymity as unconstitutionally vague and overbroad.

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. (IT-05-87).

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 2014, he was named a Fellow by the American Statistical Association.

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.

Ball was conferred a Doctor of Science honoris causa by Claremont Graduate University in 2015.

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 (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.