The Dark Side of Numbers: The Role of Population Data Systems in Human Rights Abuses

Social Research, Summer, 2001 by William Seltzer, Margo Anderson

In the last decade, the potential value of quantitative data and data systems as a tool by which human rights abuses can be described, investigated, and prosecuted has received attention from a growing number of statisticians, social scientists, and human rights workers. Jabine and Claude (1992), Spirer and Spirer (1994), and Ball (1996) provided some basic guidance for human rights workers. Subsequently, quantitative data and analysis have been used as evidence at the international criminal tribunals established for the former Yugoslavia (Brunborg, Urdal, and Lyngstad, 2001) and for Rwanda and in documenting and studying these and other human rights abuses by truth commissions and in other fora. Published reports describe the data and methods used to document the state killings in Guatemala over a 30-year period (Ball, Kobrak, and Spirer, 1999), the political killings in Kosovo in the early part of 1999 (American Bar Association and the American Association for the Advancement of Science, 2000), and the forced migration from Kosovo during the same period (Ball, 2000). Ball, Spirer, and Spirer (2000) provide further information on the methods used to estimate the number of killings in Guatemala and include reports describing research in connection with human rights violations in Haiti, Salvador, and South Africa.

In these current human rights investigations, little attention has been given to the possibility that data and related data systems may have been an element of the processes used to plan and carry out the human rights abuses under investigation. In many large-scale human rights abuses, statistical outputs, systems, and methods are a necessary part of the effort to define, find, and attack an initially dispersed target population. The discovery that such data and systems were so used is one means to establish that an abuse was not simply the result of a spontaneous and uncoordinated popular outburst of hate against members of the victim population. In addition, such findings, by providing evidence of the systematic actions of the perpetrators, go a long way toward establishing one critical element of "crimes against humanity" under international criminal law (DeGuzman, 2000: 375-376).

We conclude with a simple point: numbers and the systems that produce them are morally neutral. It is what we--or others--do with them that counts.

(*) An earlier version of this paper was presented by William Seltzer at the International Association of Official Statistics 2000 Conference, "Statistics, Development and Human Rights," Montreux, Switzerland, 4-8 September 2000.

Notes

(1) For more detailed information on a broad range of these and other methodological and technological safeguards, see the documentation on the website of the Federal Committee on Statistical Methodology (http://www.fcsm.gov). For a more general discussion, see Duncan, Jabine, and de Wolfe (1993).

References

Alonso, William, and Paul Starr, eds. The Politics of Numbers. New York: Russell Sage, 1986.