Page 479 - Invited Paper Session (IPS) - Volume 2

IPS355 Jean-Louis B.
reluctance had also been linked to the quite rudimentary basis of the
methods used by human rights activists. The first significant impulse for
involving official statisticians in human rights issues was given by the ASA
with the creation in late 1970s of its Standing Committee on Scientific
Freedom and Human Rights as a reaction to the disappearance and
assassination of Carlos Noriega, director of he INDEC, by the Argentinean
military dictatorship. Most of the founding members of this ASA
Committee expected an enlargement of its action towards exploring
possible applications of statistics to monitor the status of human rights;
nevertheless they were refrained from engaging the Committee in this
path until 1985. At the global level, the ISI started by opposing strong
resistance to attempts by some of its members to involve in more human
right. In 1981, since the 43 ISI session was organized in Buenos Aires, the
rd
Prof. Edmond Malinvaud, President of the ISI, expressed ISI members’
concerns about Carlos Noriega’s disappearance to the President of the
Argentinean Nation through a visit to the Argentinean Ambassador in
Paris. Four years later, a contributed paper meeting on Statistics,
Statisticians and Human Rights, was initially accepted and scheduled for
the 1985 ISI session in Amsterdam, but the ISI EC later decided to remove
it from the official program and it was held as an informal gathering.
During years, this reluctance to mix scientific statistical work with
“sensitive political issues” was broadly shared within the ISI. It was only in
1999, IAOS decided that its 2000 Independent Conference be devoted to
the use of statistics to assess human rights and some aspects of
democratic governance, in particular in the context of development
processes. Nowadays such works have largely been done within ISI, IAOS
and the statistical community at large.
3.6. Since a long time, the ISI has been actively helping to build statistical
capacity in developing countries. The ISI EC produced in 2013 a so-called
White Paper on Statistical Capacity Building (SPC). ISI has been proactive
in organizing several workshops on leadership and management in
different regions (Anglophone Africa in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia, in 2011
and Dar El Salaam, Tanzania, in 2015; Francophone Africa in Dakar,
Senegal, in 2012 and Yaoundé, Cameroon, in 2016; Eastern Asia in Daejon,
Korea, in 2012). ISI also organized topical workshops, e.g. on poverty in
Kathmandu, Nepal, in 2017 or I sponsoring or co-sponsoring national
activities. The ISI Committee on SPC is also one of the partners for the
organization of the UN World Data Forum that is a suitable platform for
intensifying cooperation with various professional groups, such as
information technology, geospatial information managers, data scientists,
and users, as well as civil society stakeholders. Two Forums were already

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