Michael McClintock
Director of Program
Joined the Lawyers Committee in 2002

As the Director of Program, Michael McClintock is responsible for planning all of the Lawyers Committee’s program activities - setting the organization’s goals in each of its program areas and then developing and managing all of the projects to achieve them. Mike leads a team of 30 who work in the areas of refugee protection, workers rights, international justice and the protection of human rights defenders.

Before joining the Lawyers Committee, Mike served as a researcher and director for Amnesty International for almost 20 years, moving from a focus on Latin America to a global portfolio in the late 1980s. He then moved to Human Rights Watch where he was deputy program director. In that position, which he held for eight years, Mike worked with all of the organization’s research and advocacy divisions. He had principal responsibility for work on Africa, Europe and Central Asia, Children's Rights, and for the Arms Division.

Mike has participated in numerous fact-finding missions - in Central and South America, Northern Ireland, Ethiopia and the Philippines. He has written on such issues as humanitarian military intervention, the prevention of genocide and corporate responsibility.

Mike is the author of histories of El Salvador and Guatemala. He has also written a book on U.S. military doctrine and foreign policy from a human rights perspective, Instruments of Statecraft: U.S. Guerrilla Warfare, Counterinsurgency and Counterterroirsm, 1940-1990 (Pantheon, 1992).

Mike is a graduate of Ohio University (1972) and the University of Wisconsin (1974).