Irene Khan | |
---|---|
UN Special Rapporteur on Freedom of Expression | |
Assumed office July 2020 | |
Preceded by | David Kaye |
Director-General of the International Development Law Organization | |
In office January 2012 –December 2019 | |
Preceded by | William T. Loris |
Succeeded by | Jan Beagle |
Chancellor of the University of Salford | |
In office 2009–2015 | |
Preceded by | Professor Sir Martin Harris |
Succeeded by | Jackie Kay |
Secretary-General of Amnesty International | |
In office 2001–2009 | |
Preceded by | Pierre Sané |
Succeeded by | Salil Shetty |
Personal details | |
Born | Irene Zubaida Khan 24 December 1956 Dhaka,East Pakistan (now Bangladesh) |
Nationality | Bangladeshi,British |
Relatives | Mahbub Ali Khan (Uncle) Zubaida Rahman (Cousin) |
Education | Law |
Alma mater | University of Manchester Harvard Law School |
Irene Zubaida Khan (born 24 December 1956) is a Bangladeshi british lawyer and human rights activist. [1] [2] She is serving as the United Nations Special Rapporteur for freedom of expression and opinion. [3] [4] She previously served as the seventh Secretary General of Amnesty International (from 2001 to 2009). In 2011,she was elected Director-General of the International Development Law Organization (IDLO) in Rome,an intergovernmental organization that works to promote the rule of law,and sustainable development. She was a consulting editor of The Daily Star in Bangladesh from 2010 to 2011. [5] [6]
Khan was born on 24 December 1956 in Dhaka,East Pakistan (now Bangladesh),though her ancestral home is in Birahimpur,Sylhet. She is the daughter of Sikander Ali Khan,a Bengali Muslim medical doctor;granddaughter of Ahmed Ali Khan,a Cambridge University mathematics graduate and barrister;and great-granddaughter of Assadar Ali Khan,the personal physician of Syed Hasan Imam. Her great-great-grandfather,Abid Khan,was the descendant of an Afghan migrant to Bengal. [7] Her uncle,Rear Admiral Mahbub Ali Khan,was the chief of the Bangladesh Navy. She was the star pupil at St Francis Xavier's Green Herald International School,1964-1972 where she was the record holder at the school-leaving examinations.
During her childhood,East Pakistan became the independent nation of Bangladesh in 1971 following the Bangladesh Liberation War. The genocide that occurred during the war helped shape the teenage Khan's activist viewpoint. She left Bangladesh as a teenager for St. Louis Grammar school in Kikeel,Northern Ireland 1973–1975. [8]
Khan went to England,where she studied law at the University of Manchester and then,in the United States,at Harvard Law School. She specialized in public international law and human rights. [9]
Khan helped to create the organisation Concern Universal in 1977,an international development and emergency relief organisation. She began her career as a human rights activist with the International Commission of Jurists in 1979.
Khan went to work at the United Nations in 1980. She spent 20 years at the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR). In 1995 she was appointed UNHCR India's Chief of Mission,becoming the youngest UNHCR country representative at that time. After less than one year in New Delhi the Indian government requested that she be removed from that position. During the Kosovo crisis in 1999,Khan led the UNHCR team in the Republic of Macedonia for three months. This led to her being appointed as Deputy Director of International Protection later that year.
In August 2020,the Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights appointed Khan to the position of Special Rapporteur on freedom of expression and opinion. [4] [10]
Irene Khan is currently the Chair of the Supervisory Board of BRAC International. [11]
On January 23,2024,Khan met with National Privacy Commission to examine the state of rights to freedom of opinion and expression in the Philippines. [12]
Khan joined Amnesty International in 2001 as its Secretary General. [9] In her first year of office,she reformed Amnesty's response to human rights crises and launched the campaign to close the United States' Guantanamo Bay detention camp,which held suspected enemy combatants. In 2004 she initiated a global campaign to stop violence against women. In May 2009 Khan launched Amnesty's "Demand Dignity" campaign to fight human rights abuses that impoverish people and keep them poor. [9] [13]
During her leadership of IDLO,Irene Khan has promoted the notion that the rule of law is an important tool that can advance equity and people-centered development,whether in reducing inequalities or fostering social justice and inclusion for peace. [14]
Khan is featured in a 2003 TV documentary titled Human Rights, by the French filmmaker Denis Delestrac. The film,shot in Colombia,Israel,Palestine and Pakistan,analyses how armed conflicts affect civilian communities and foster forced migration. In 2009 Khan was featured in Soldiers of Peace, an anti-war film. [17] [18]
In 2008,she was one of the two finalists for the election of the new Chancellor of the University of Manchester. [22] In July 2009,she was appointed as Chancellor of the University of Salford [9] a post she held until January 2015.
In 2006 she was awarded the City of Sydney Peace Prize for "her leadership as a courageous advocate of universal respect for human rights,and her skills in identifying violence against women as a massive injustice and therefore a priority in campaigning for peace. [23]
This section may lend undue weight to certain ideas, incidents, or controversies.(December 2020) |
In 2003, Irene Khan wrote a piece titled Security for Whom? in which she, inter alia, accused the allies of the occupying force in Afghanistan of "mass killings". [24]
In 2005, Irene Khan penned the introduction to that year's Amnesty International report in which she, inter alia, referred to the detention facility at Guantanamo Bay as "the gulag of our time," accusing the United States of "thumb[ing] its nose at the rule of law and human rights [as] it grants a licence to others to commit abuse with impunity". [25] Much backlash followed in the media. Michael Totten of World Affairs called her a "hysterical heavy-breather". [26] An editorial opinion in the Washington Post referred to it as "[i]t is ALWAYS SAD when a solid, trustworthy institution loses its bearings and joins in the partisan fracas that nowadays passes for political discourse". [27] John Podhoretz of the New York Post said that "[t]he case of Amnesty International proves that well-meaning people can make morality their life's work and still be little more than moral idiots." [28] In his The United Nations, Peace and Security, Ramesh Thakur called Khan's likening of the Guantanamo Bay detention facility to a gulag a "hyperbole" that is "wrong". [29] A former Soviet prisoner of conscience, Pavel Litvinov, told the Amnesty International staffer, who called him to inquire on behalf of Khan whether it would be appropriate to use the word 'gulag' in an Amnesty report and in relation in the Guantanamo Bay detention facility, that there was "an enormous difference" between the gulags and the Guantanamo Bay detention facility. [30] Roger Kimball of Arma Virumque called it "a preposterous remark". [31] The Bush administration responded to it in the following manner: President Bush called it "an absurd allegation;" Vice President Cheney said he was "offended by it;" Defense Secretary Rumsfeld called it "reprehensible" and "those who make such outlandish charges los[ing] any claim to objectivity or seriousness". [32] Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Myers called it "absolutely irresponsible" [33] The White House spokesman Scott McClellan called the characterization "ridiculous". [34] Anne Applebaum, the author of Gulag: A History, found this characterization "infuriating," stating that "Amnesty misus[ed] language [and] discard[ed] its former neutrality" and that it "attack[ed] the American government for the satisfaction of [the Amnesty's] own political faction". [35]
However, not everyone rallied against Khan's 'gulag' characterization. Retired US State Department officer Edmund McWilliams who monitored prisoner abuse committed in the Soviet Union and Vietnam stated the following in support of Khan's characterization: "I note that abuses that I reported on in those inhumane systems parallel abuses reported in Guantanamo, at the Bagram air base in Afghanistan and at the Abu Ghriab prison: prisoners suspended from the ceiling and beaten to death; widespread "waterboarding;" prisoners "disappeared" to preclude monitoring by the International Committee of the Red Cross—and all with almost no senior-level accountability". [36] Aryeh Neier stated that the criticisms of Khan's statement were exaggerations and added, "The flurry of attention to Irene Khan's statement about the gulag probably contributed to a trend that had already been noted in prior years: namely, a decline in the organization's prestige in the United States to a level below its very high standing in Europe." [37]
In February 2011, newspaper stories in the UK revealed that Khan had received a payment of £533,103 from Amnesty International following her resignation from the organization on 31 December 2009, [38] a fact pointed to from Amnesty's records for the 2009–2010 financial year. The sum paid to her was in excess of four times her annual salary of £132,490. [38] The deputy secretary general, Kate Gilmore, who also resigned in December 2009, received an ex-gratia payment of £320,000. [38] [39] Peter Pack, the chairman of Amnesty's International Executive Committee (IEC), initially stated on 19 February 2011: "The payments to outgoing secretary general Irene Khan shown in the accounts of AI (Amnesty International) Ltd for the year ending 31 March 2010 include payments made as part of a confidential agreement between AI Ltd and Irene Khan" [39] and that "It is a term of this agreement that no further comment on it will be made by either party." [38]
The payment and AI's initial response to its leakage to the press led to considerable outcry. Philip Davies, the Conservative MP for Shipley, decried the payment, telling the Daily Express : "I am sure people making donations to Amnesty, in the belief they are alleviating poverty, never dreamed they were subsidising a fat cat payout. This will disillusion many benefactors." [39] On 21 February Peter Pack issued a further statement, in which he said that the payment was a "unique situation" that was "in the best interest of Amnesty's work" and that there would be no repetition of it. [38] He stated that "the new secretary general, with the full support of the IEC, has initiated a process to review our employment policies and procedures to ensure that such a situation does not happen again." [38] Pack also stated that Amnesty was "fully committed to applying all the resources that we receive from our millions of supporters to the fight for human rights". [38] On 25 February, Pack issued a letter to Amnesty members and staff. In summary, it states that the IEC in 2008 had decided not to prolong Khan's contract for a third term. In the following months, IEC discovered that due to British employment law, it had to choose between the three options of either offering Khan a third term, discontinuing her post and, in their judgement, risking legal consequences, or signing a confidential agreement and issuing a pay compensation. [40]
Khan's lawyers issued a letter published by the Charity Times "It was not accurate of Amnesty International to record in its 2009/2010 corporate accounts that the amount £532,000 was paid to our client". [41] The published letter detailed the sum as including: a) her salary and contractual benefits until 31 December 2009; b) outstanding back pay and the shortfall arising in her contractual benefits from previous years (in some part going back to 2005); relocation costs for her return abroad from where she had been recruited; d) compensation as well as severance payment (£115,000 gross) in respect of a legal claim and grievances that our client had asserted against Amnesty International Limited pursuant to her UK employment rights). [41] Outgoing IEC Chairman Peter Pack, stated that paying off Khan was "the least worst option" available to IEC. [42] The amount paid out to Khan and her deputy (who was also removed by IEC) amounted to 4% of Amnesty International's budget that year. [43] The organization was hurt by this scandal and by choosing to pay Khan to leave,[ according to whom? ] with Chairman Pack promising to make amends and move the organization forward following Khan's departure. [42]
Zubaida Rahman, the wife of politician Tarique Rahman of the Bangladesh Nationalist Party (BNP) is the cousin of Irene Khan. [44] Irene Khan's uncle Rear Admiral Mahbub Ali Khan was the Chief of the Naval Staff of Bangladesh during the regime of Ziaur Rahman. [44]
Asma Jilani Jahangir was a Pakistani Muhajir human rights lawyer and social activist who co-founded and chaired the Human Rights Commission of Pakistan and AGHS Legal Aid Cell. Jahangir was known for playing a prominent role in the Lawyers' Movement and served as the United Nations Special Rapporteur on Freedom of Religion or Belief and as a trustee at the International Crisis Group.
This article describes the use of torture since the adoption of the 1948 Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR), which prohibited it. Torture is prohibited by international law and is illegal in most countries. However, it is still used by many governments.
The rights of civilian and military prisoners are governed by both national and international law. International conventions include the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights; the United Nations' Minimum Rules for the Treatment of Prisoners, the European Committee for the Prevention of Torture and Inhuman or Degrading Treatment or Punishment, and the Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities.
Ghost detainee is a term used in the executive branch of the United States government to designate a person held in a detention center, whose identity has been hidden by keeping them unregistered and therefore anonymous. Such uses arose as the Bush administration initiated the War on Terror following the 9/11 attacks of 2001 in the United States. As documented in the 2004 Taguba Report, it was used in the same manner by United States officials and contractors of the Joint Interrogation and Debriefing Center at the Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq in 2003–2004.
Fionnuala Ní Aoláin is an Irish academic lawyer specialising in human rights law. She was the Special Rapporteur on the promotion and protection of human rights and fundamental freedoms while countering terrorism for the United Nations Human Rights Council from August 1, 2017 - November 2023.
Manfred Nowak is an Austrian human rights expert, who served as the United Nations Special Rapporteur on Torture from 2004 to 2010. He is Secretary General of the Global Campus of Human Rights in Venice, Italy, Professor of International Human Rights, and Scientific Director of the Vienna Master of Arts in Applied Human Rights at the University of Applied Arts in Vienna. He is also co-founder and former Director of the Ludwig Boltzmann Institute of Human Rights and a former judge at the Human Rights Chamber for Bosnia and Herzegovina. In 2016, he was appointed Independent Expert leading the United Nations Global Study on Children Deprived of Liberty.
The Road to Guantánamo, alternatively The Road to Guantanamo, is a British 2006 docudrama film written and directed by Michael Winterbottom and Mat Whitecross about the incarceration of three British citizens, who were captured in 2001 in Afghanistan and detained by the United States there and for more than two years at the detainment camp in Guantanamo Bay Naval Base, Cuba. It premiered at the Berlinale on 14 February 2006, and was first shown in the UK on Channel 4 on 9 March 2006. The following day it was the first film to be released simultaneously in cinemas, on DVD, and on the Internet.
Ian Martin is an English human rights activist/advisor and sometime United Nations official. His most recent UN assignment was as the Special Representative of the Secretary-General and Head of the United Nations Support Mission in Libya. From 2015 to 2018 he was Executive Director of Security Council Report.
The Guantanamo Bay detention camp, also known as GTMO, GITMO, or just Guantanamo Bay, is a United States military prison within Naval Station Guantanamo Bay (NSGB), on the coast of Guantánamo Bay, Cuba. It was established in January 2002 by U.S. President George W. Bush to hold terrorism suspects and "illegal enemy combatants" during the Global War on Terrorism following the attacks of September 11, 2001. As of August 2024, at least 780 persons from 48 countries have been detained at the camp since its creation, of whom 740 had been transferred elsewhere, 9 died in custody, and 30 remain; only 16 detainees have ever been charged by the U.S. with criminal offenses.
Sarathambal Saravanbavananthatkurukal or better known as Sarathambal was a minority Sri Lankan Tamil woman who was gang raped and killed on 28 December 1999. This became an internationally known incident of the Sri Lankan Civil War.
Amnesty International is an international non-governmental organization focused on human rights, with its headquarters in the United Kingdom. The organization says it has more than ten million members and supporters around the world. The stated mission of the organization is to campaign for "a world in which every person enjoys all of the human rights enshrined in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights and other international human rights instruments." The organization has played a notable role on human rights issues due to its frequent citation in media and by world leaders.
Jan Margaret Beagle is a New Zealand diplomat who has been serving as the Director-General of the International Development Law Organization (IDLO) since 2020. From 2017 until 2019, she was the Under-Secretary-General of the United Nations for Management, appointed to this position by United Nations Secretary-General António Guterres on 1 June 2017. She then served as Special Advisor to the Secretary-General on Systemwide Implementation of Chief Executive Board decisions.
Martin Scheinin is an international law scholar who served as the first United Nations Special Rapporteur on human rights and counter-terrorism in 2005–2011. He was selected for this position after serving for eight years (1997–2004) as member of the United Nations Human Rights Committee, the independent expert body monitoring states' compliance with the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights. While on the committee, he was known as a defendant of the rights of minorities and indigenous peoples and opponent of capital punishment, as well as the drafter of the committee's General Comment No. 29 on states of emergency.
The government of Belarus is criticized for its human rights violations and persecution of non-governmental organisations, independent journalists, national minorities, and opposition politicians. In a testimony to the United States Senate Committee on Foreign Relations, former United States Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice labeled Belarus as one of the world's six "outposts of tyranny". In response, the Belarusian government called the assessment "quite far from reality". During 2020 Belarusian presidential election and protests, the number of political prisoners recognized by Viasna Human Rights Centre rose dramatically to 1062 as of 16 February 2022. Several people died after the use of unlawful and abusive force by law enforcement officials during 2020 protests. According to Amnesty International, the authorities did not investigate violations during protests, but instead harassed those who challenged their version of events. In July 2021, the authorities launched a campaign against the remaining non-governmental organizations, liquidating at least 270 of them by October, including all previously registered human rights organizations in the country.
In the United States, human rights consists of a series of rights which are legally protected by the Constitution of the United States, state constitutions, treaty and customary international law, legislation enacted by Congress and state legislatures, and state referendums and citizen's initiatives. The Federal Government has, through a ratified constitution, guaranteed unalienable rights to its citizens and non-citizens. These rights have evolved over time through constitutional amendments, legislation, and judicial precedent. Along with the rights themselves, the portion of the population which has been granted these rights has been expanded over time. Within the United States, federal courts have jurisdiction over international human rights laws.
Agnès Callamard is a French human rights activist who is the Secretary General of Amnesty International. She was previously the Special Rapporteur on extrajudicial, summary, or arbitrary executions appointed by the United Nations Human Rights Council, and the former Director of the Columbia University Global Freedom of Expression project.
Criticism of Amnesty International includes claims of selection bias, as well as ideology and foreign policy biases. Various governments criticised by Amnesty International have in turn criticised the organization, complaining about what they assert constituted one-sided reporting.
The International Development Law Organization (IDLO) is an intergovernmental organization dedicated to the promotion of the rule of law.
Marjorie Milne Farquharson was a political scientist and human rights worker.
Alice Jill Edwards is an Australian lawyer and scholar. She is the United Nations Special Rapporteur on Torture and Other Cruel, Inhuman or Degrading Treatment or Punishment.
{{cite magazine}}
: CS1 maint: unfit URL (link)