III. >> M  ethodological Approaches to Human Rights Indicators >> Ethical, statistical and human rights considerations in indicator selection Box 11 Human rights of statisticians While there is the obligation to protect subjects of statistical surveys and other enquiries against misuse of data, including the violation of their right to privacy as reflected in international human rights instruments (see above), protecting statisticians who generate and collect data and related information is equally important. Unfortunately, cases of violation of the most basic human rights of some official statisticians also confirm the need for complementary safeguards to protect their work. Graciela Mellibovsky Saidler was a 29-year-old Argentine Government economist. In 1976 she produced a statistical study on conditions in the slums of Buenos Aires which was so deeply embarrassing to the military dictatorship that it was publicly singled out by the Junta leader, General Jorge Videla, as an example of the infiltration of subversives into the Government. Shortly afterwards, on 25 September 1976, she “disappeared”. [In 1976,] Carlos Noriega, who was then director of the Argentine national statistical office, […] left his post. Informal reports from colleagues indicated that he had been forced out because he refused requests from the newly established military government to tamper with official data series. […] Early in February 1977, while on vacation in Mar del Plata with his wife and children, Noriega was detained by persons believed to be agents of the government or members of paramilitary groups. The government never acknowledged that he was in custody. Presumably, he was executed, one of the thousands of victims of Argentina’s “dirty war.”a Although these stories may be extreme cases, they help illustrate the tensions that may prevail between statistics and politics. The history of the collection of population statistics has been affected by such violations as well as numerous other abuses, often more insidious, dealing with censorship and manipulation in data collection and dissemination for purposes of political propaganda. In the former Soviet Union, Joseph Stalin himself used falsified population figures to hide great loss of human life owing to famine, war and repression. Manipulated life expectancy and infant mortality indicators were also used by the Soviet leaders Nikita Krushchev and Leonid Brezhnev to hide the reality.b In all such instances, specific standards are necessary to protect the integrity and work of statisticians against abusive and unethical interferences from politicians or sponsors of the data collection. Ensuring the independence, objectivity and transparency of statistical work is a fundamental prerequisite for the production and dissemination of accurate information for a more effective promotion, monitoring and implementation of human rights. a. Jana Asher, David Banks and Fritz J. Scheuren, eds., Statistical Methods for Human Rights (Springer, 2008), p. v and chap. 9: Thomas B. Jabine and Douglas A. Samuelson, “Human rights of statisticians and statistics of human rights: early history of the American Statistical Association’s Committee on Scientific Freedom and Human Rights”. b. Mark Tolts, “The failure of demographic statistics: a Soviet response to population troubles”, paper presented at the IUSSP XXIV General Population Conference, Salvador de Bahia, Brazil, 18–24 August 2001. Human Rights Indicators 49