title: "Statistical evidence" for the investigation of international crimes.
abstract: Statistics are widely applied throughout scientific research disciplines but 'statistical evidence' sounds surely an unhappy term rather avoided. In International Criminal Law the term seems to stress the value that statistical methods have for the analysis of large-scale victimisation and describes rather the tools used to support the evidence. However, statistics is required for valid, reliable and objective results that would otherwise be left in the dusty political sphere of the warring parties and their actors. But what are the concepts to do so? Today's presentation shows two widely known cases from the International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia (ICTY) where statisticians analysed the Crime Scenes in Srebrenica and Kosovo. The cases introduce two different analytical approaches. Firstly, in Srebrenica the analysts focussed on civilians that were killed during the take over of the enclave. Thus the findings are descriptive, summarizing observations and presenting results based on simple statistical tools. Secondly, in Kosovo the researchers asked what caused the killings and refugee migration during the NATO air campaign in springtime 1999. Here, in a complex environment statistical methods are exercised to determine causal relations. Hypotheses are tested to be consistent with huge data sets collected from a broad field of sources, to finally end up with Statistical Evidence.
authors.affiliation: Universität Kassel, Kassel.
authors.forename: Boris
authors.initials: B
authors.lastname: Mijatovic
mesh_terms: D003415:Crime / Q000706:statistics & numerical data*; D006708:Homicide; D006801:Humans; D038622:Internationality; D015203:Reproducibility of Results; D012426:Russia; D015022:Yugoslavia