BENETECH'S DR. PATRICK BALL TESTIFIES IN KOSOVO HUMAN RIGHTS CASE

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE

Palo Alto, CA, March 21, 2007 –The Director of the Benetech Human Rights Program, Dr. Patrick Ball, provided testimony last month for the International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia (ICTY) in its case against six former Serb military and government leaders who are charged with crimes against humanity.

The defendants were indicted together with former Serb and Yugoslav president Slobodan Milošević in May of 1999 in connection with the deaths and displacement of thousands of ethnic Albanians in Kosovo province during the spring of 1999. Dr. Ball originally testified for the ICTY in the trial of Milošević in March of 2002.

In his testimony last month against Milošević's fellow indicteees, Dr. Ball estimated that 9,000 to 12,000 ethnic Albanians were killed in Kosovo between March and June of 1999. At that time, about 875,000 people, half of all Kosovar Albanians, fled from Kosovo to Albania, Macedonia, and neighboring countries.

During his expert testimony, Dr. Ball showed that the patterns of killings and migrations of ethnic Albanians in Kosovo are significantly different than the patterns of activity associated with NATO and the Kosovo Liberation Army (KLA) forces at that same time. Based on this data, Dr. Ball concluded that neither NATO, nor KLA activity, could have caused these killings or migrations as claimed by the Yugoslav government.

The data cited by Dr. Ball is based on exhumation records, three sets of interviews, and migration data provided by Albanian border guards at a main crossing point who allowed Dr. Ball to copy their records. Ball also used data from the United Nations High Commission for Refugees and the Albanian government's crisis task force.

While these statistics do not provide proof of which entity caused the killings and migrations in Kosovo, they permit the rejection of hypotheses that are inconsistent with observed patterns. These conclusions are helpful to prosecutors who can call defense theories into question. The prosecution, which has spent a year arguing this case, has rested and the defense will now begin a year of arguments on behalf of the defendants.

About Benetech

Benetech is a nonprofit technology development organization based on Silicon Valley. Benetech specifically pursues endeavors with a strong social, rather than financial, rate of return on investment, bringing open source technology and private sector management techniques to bear in creating innovative, non-traditional solutions to challenging social issues.

Background Information on ICTY Testimony

The software tools used to generate statistical data on the patterns of killings and migrations in Kosovo were developed by Dr. Patrick Ball, Director of the Benetech Human Rights Program. This same technology, which derives from mathematical demography, has been used by Benetech's Human Rights Data Analysis Group (HRDAG) to develop the Analayzer software.

Analyzer is used to collect, maintain and analyze information about large-scale human rights violations. The methodology and concepts behind this application are based on techniques used by human rights professionals in countries around the world for more than fifteen years.

Analyzer has been deployed at the Truth and Reconciliation Commission and Campaign for Good Governance in Sierra Leone, member non-governmental organizations for the Human Rights Accountability Coalition (HRAC) in Sri Lanka, and the Washington D.C.-based Boroumand Foundation for the Promotion of Human Rights and Democracy in Iran.

Analyzer has also been utilized to evaluate human rights data in Colombia and is still in use in Sri Lanka. It will be used this year by HRDAG to analyze human rights data from Guatemala, Liberia and perhaps Burma. The technology developed while creating Analyzer has also been used by HRDAG to create a series of stand alone software tools, such as the Stratifier, which allows non-technical users to draw complex samples from a pool of data and select small subsets for use in human rights data analysis.

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