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1. Data and Genocide Acts
By Renata Avila
Berlin, 10th March 2015.

2. Some context

3. Diversity: 24 linguistic groups

4. Armed Conflict

5. Genocide Acts: how to prove those

6. Efraín Rios Montt in power

7. Efrain Rios Montt in trial

8. How to prove it?
• Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide
(CPPCG)
• ...any of the following acts committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in
part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group, as such:
• (a) Killing members of the group;
• (b) Causing serious bodily or mental harm to members of the group;
• (c) Deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring
about its physical destruction in whole or in part;
• (d) Imposing measures intended to prevent births within the group;
• (e) Forcibly transferring children of the group to another group.
• — Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of
Genocide, Article 2[2]

9. In short…
Genocide is a specific crime it does not mean
killing a lot of people. Genocide specifically
means that you picked out a particular group.

10. Truth Commission

11. Testimonies

12. Exhumations *

13. The story told by the remains

14. But how can you prove it was
systematic and against x ethnic group?

15. Meet Patrick Ball

16. What Data + Statistics did
• The analysis of Patrick Ball using data from
different sources and statistics to fill the
missing information gaps, showed that the
homicide rate for non-indigenous peoples in
the Ixil region was 0.7 percent, while the
homicide rate for the Maya was 5.5 percent:
the probability of being killed by the Army was
8 times greater for the Maya Ixil than for their
non-indigenous neighbors.

17. Justice achieved

18. For a week…

19. The curious case of Metadata to
determine command responsibility

20. Random discovery

21. National Police Historical Archive

22. Some ideas
• How could we potentially use the discoveries
of truth commissions and the work done in
the last 2.5 decades to find patterns of
violence?
• Will a data powered analysis help us to
prevent a genocide from happening?