Charlie Clements

Charlie Clements is a well-known human rights activist and public health physician. Throughout the years, Clements has faced several moral dilemmas that shaped his life. As a distinguished graduate of the Air Force Academy who had flown more than 50 missions in the Vietnam War, he decided the war was immoral and refused to fly missions in support of the invasion of Cambodia. Later, as a newly trained physician, he chose to work in the midst of El Salvador's civil war, where the villages he served were bombed, rocketed, or strafed by some of the same aircraft in which he had previously trained.

For two years in the late 1980s, Clements served as director of human rights education at UUSC, leading a number of congressional fact-finding delegations to Central America. In 1997, as president of Physicians for Human Rights, he participated both in the Nobel Peace Prize ceremony and the treaty signing for the International Campaign to Ban Landmines. Clements is author of Witness to War (Bantam) and subject of an Academy Award-winning documentary of the same title.

In February 2010, Clements stepped down from his role as the UUSC's chief executive officer to accept a new position as executive director of the Carr Center for Human Rights Policy at John F. Kennedy School of Government at Harvard University.