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Irene Zubaida Khan (born 1949 in Dhaka, Bangladesh) is the seventh and current Secretary-General of human rights organisation Amnesty International.
Irene Khan, Secretary General since August 2001 Biography
Early years
Bangladeshi Khan grew up in a relatively wealthy family in the poverty and civil war-racked developing nation, at the time when it achieved independence as East Pakistan. The civil war and the human rights abuses that occurred during it, helped shape teenage Khan's activist viewpoint, as she fled as a refugee to a school in Northern Ireland.
Interested in the subject from a young age, Khan studied law at the University of Manchester. She went on to the USA to study the subject at Harvard Law School, specialising in public international law and human rights. Interested in working directly with people to change their lives, she helped found the development organisation, Concern Universal, in 1977 and began her work as a human-rights activist with the International Commission of Jurists in 1979.
United Nations career
She next joined the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) in 1980, and she worked in a variety of positions at Headquarters and in field operations to promote the international protection of refugees. From 1991-95 she was Senior Executive Officer to Mrs. Sadako Ogata, then UN High Commissioner for Refugees. She was appointed as the UNHCR Chief of Mission in India in 1995, the youngest UNHCR country representative at that time, and in 1998 headed the UNHCR Centre for Research and Documentation. She led the UNHCR team in Former Yugoslav Republic of Macedonia during the Kosovo crisis in 1999, and was appointed Deputy Director of International Protection later that year.
Amnesty International career
Khan joined Amnesty International in August 2001 as Secretary-General.
She took up the leadership of AI in its 40th anniversary year as the organization began a process of change and renewal to address the complex nature of contemporary human rights violations, and confronted the challenging developments in the wake of the attacks of 11 September.
In her first year in office, Irene reformed AI's response to crisis situations, personally leading high level missions to Pakistan during the bombing of Afghanistan, to Israel/Occupied Territories just after the Israeli occupation of Jenin, and to Colombia before the Presidential elections in May 2003. Deeply concerned about violence against women, she called for better protection of women's human rights in meetings with President Musharraf of Pakistan, President Émile Lahoud of Lebanon and Prime Minister Khaleda Zia of Bangladesh. She has initiated a process of consultations with women activists to design a global campaign by Amnesty International against violence on women.
Irene has been keen to draw attention to hidden human rights violations. In Australia, she drew attention to the plight of asylum seekers in detention. In Burundi, she met with victims of massacres and urged President Pierre Buyoya and other parties in the conflict to end the cycle of human rights abuse. In Bulgaria, she led a campaign to end discrimination of those suffering from mental disabilities.
She is the first woman, the first Asian, and the first Muslim to hold the position of Amnesty International Secretary-General.
Independent plaudits
She is the recipient of several academic awards, a Ford Foundation Fellowship, and the Pilkington "Woman of the Year" Award 2002.
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