Megan Price, Human Rights Data Analysis Group Executive Director

ASA members Megan Price and Patrick Ball of the Human Rights Data Analysis Group (HRDAG) recently coauthored a technical memo that accompanied the Amnesty International report ‘It Breaks the Human’: Torture, Disease, and Death in Syria’s Prisons.’ The report details the conditions and mortality in Syrian prisons from 2011 to 2015 and includes data analysis conducted by HRDAG.

The technical memo explains the methodology, sources, and implications of the report’s findings. The HRDAG team used data from four sources to find a total of 12,270 fully documented, identifiable people killed while in detention. The team of scientists then used multiple systems estimation to estimate the number of undocumented killings in the prisons during the same period.

The estimated total (documented and undocumented) deaths is 17,723 (95% credible interval (13,409, 18,713)). In effect, 25 percent of the killings in detention were unreported. The estimate includes only those killed while in detention, not the “field executions” of soldiers who were killed, for example, for refusing to fire on civilians.

The estimate of 17,723 killings is conservative due to the strict criteria the team used to classify killings and the difficulty of collecting information about what happens in detention centers.

HRDAG is a nonprofit, nonpartisan organization that applies rigorous science to the analysis of human rights violations around the world.