Human rights of statisticians and statistics of human rights: Early history of the American statistical association's committee on scientific freedom and human rights

Abstract

One warm early summer evening in 1986, Doug Samuelson's wife called him to their kitchen to take a phone call. When he answered, Samuelson got what he later described as "one of the nicest surprises, and overall highlights, of my entire life," as the caller explained, "This is Victor Kipnis. I'm calling to thank you. I'm in Toronto!" Kipnis' release from the Soviet Union was the culmination of several years of effort on behalf of Soviet "refuseniks"-citizens who had been denied permission to emigrate-by the American Statistical Association's Committee on Scientific Freedom and Human Rights. Samuelson had delivered a paper by Kipnis, Eugene Grechanovsky, and Ilya Pinsker at the 1985 American Statistical Association (ASA) Annual Meetings to help dramatize their situation (Pinsker et al. 1985). The paper, smuggled out of the Soviet Union, represented work these statisticians had done in spite of pressure from the Soviet authorities. At the time of the presentation, Committee members invited those present to sign petitions to Soviet authorities on behalf of the authors. Samuelson also prepared a camera-ready copy of the paper for the proceedings volume. Readers may find it unremarkable that ASA made such an effort to help Soviet statisticians and that it has a Committee on Scientific Freedom and Human Rights. Yet that committee is a relatively late arrival in ASA's 165-year history, and it was not established without opposition. In this chapter, the authors, both former chairs of the Committee1, will describe how and why the Committee was formed in the late 1970s, and how its charge was expanded, again with some difficulty, to cover not only work on behalf of statisticians whose rights are believed to be violated, but also the encouragement of the use of sound statistical methods in monitoring the status of human rights everywhere. We will also deal briefly with attempts, which were less successful, to persuade the International Statistical Institute to engage in similar activities. Most of the eventswe describe took place between 1976 and 1988. Except for a short paper by Jabine (1985a), documentation of the early days of the Committee is limited, and the authors have had to rely largely on memories of the past. We were aided in this task by reviewers of early drafts, and would like to thank Fred Leone, R. Clifton Bailey, Herbert and Louise Spirer, and Eric Stover for their valuable assistance. © 2008 Springer Science+Business Media, LLC.