For Immediate Release
Physicians for Human Rights mourns the passing Richard Pierre Claude, a driving force behind PHR since the organization’s earliest days.
Richard was one of the small band of pioneers and visionaries who seized on the notion that science and medicine contained unexplored and underexploited wonders for the field of human rights. Richard brought to PHR his wisdom gained from an eclectic understanding and experience of human rights law, policy, and practice, and matched it with the ideas of a group of passionate doctors who were eager to explore the myriad intersections of medicine and human rights. As PHR launched investigations in Chile on behalf of doctors leading the battle against Pinochet’s regime of torture and killing, Richard grounded their findings in analysis and policy reform proposals.
While Richard continued to bring his soft-spoken insights and careful questions to PHR’s leadership, his prolific writings on human rights and science gathered up our experiences and scrutinized them for scholars and new practitioners. His 2002 volume, Science in the Service of Human Rights has captured the contributions of doctors in the evaluation of torture for asylum claims, the courage of health professionals who defend medical ethics on the battlefront, the power of DNA technology to identify the dead and reunite the living, and the capacity of statistics as the pursuit of truth to understand health and human rights problems that we had previously conveyed largely through anecdote and witness testimony.
“Richard exemplified the notion that health professionals have the power—and thus, the duty—to work against suffering wherever it occurs. His drive and compassion will be missed, even as his legacy inspires future generations of human rights activists,” said Frank Donaghue, CEO of PHR.
Physicians for Human Rights (PHR) is a New York-based advocacy organization that uses science and medicine to prevent mass atrocities and severe human rights violations. Learn more here.