Michael McClintock
Consultant

Michael McClintock currently works as a consultant and advisor to the Fighting Discrimination Program.

Previously, as the Director of Research for Human Rights First, Mike set standards for research, analysis, and advocacy and was responsible for program procedures and methodology, program publications and public information, and ensuring appropriate training for program staff. Mike commissioned and managed special projects and initiatives and led the Program Department’s research and development function. Mike also directed the organization’s Discrimination Initiative and then the Fighting Discrimination Program, with its special focus on hate crimes.

Before joining Human Rights First, 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 the Africa, Europe and Central Asia, Children's Rights, and Arms Divisions.
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, hate crimes and other aspects of discrimination, 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 Counterterrorism, 1940-1990 (Pantheon, 1992).