Foreign Affairs Magazine Cites Benetech’s Human Rights Work

Leading foreign policy magazine Foreign Affairs posted a story about the Syrian civil war citing Benetech’s United Nations report of conflict-related killings in Syria.

In the story, titled “Syria’s State of Impunity,” David Kaye, a professor at the University of California, Irvine, School of Law, notes that while well-respected human rights groups such as Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch have shown the regime of Bashar al-Assad “to be responsible for attacks directed against civilians, torture of prisoners, summary executions, and the use of chemical weapons, among other crimes,” it is Benetech’s “detailed report last January for the UN that identified nearly 60,000 individual killings, a number that now likely exceeds 100,000.”

This report, released in January 2013 by the United Nations Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights (OHCHR), provides an analysis of the total number of documented conflict-related killings in Syria between March 2011 and November 2012. Scientists Megan Price, Jeff Klingner and Patrick Ball of the Human Rights Data Analysis Group (HRDAG), formerly part of Benetech’s Human Rights Program and now an independent organization, authored the study based on a statistical analysis they had conducted.

You can read our press release as well as the complete report on our website.