Charlie Clements is the Carr Center's Executive Director. Prior to coming to
the Carr Center, Clements, a widely respected human rights activist and public health physician, served as
president of Unitarian Universalist Service Committee from August 2003 until February 2010. Prior to
taking the position at UUSC, he served
as executive director of Border WaterWorks, an initiative of the Pew Charitable Trusts and the El Paso
Community Foundation, which assisted small U.S. communities along the border without running water or
sewers to construct such desperately needed infrastructure.
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 and the subject of an
Academy Award-winning documentary of the same title.
Executive Director, Carr Center for Human Rights Policy
Adjunct Lecturer, Public Policy, Harvard Kennedy School
Faculty, Harvard Humanitarian Initiative