Irene Khan

Early life

Khan was born in Dhaka, East Pakistan (now Bangladesh). Her family came from Sylhet. She is the daughter of Sikander Ali Khan, a medical doctor; granddaughter of Ahmed Ali Khan, a Cambridge University graduate and barrister; and great-granddaughter of Asdar Ali Khan of Calcutta, the personal physician of Syed Hasan Imam. 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, 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. Human rights abuses that occurred during the war helped shape the teenage Khan's activist viewpoint. She left Bangladesh as a teenager for school in Northern Ireland.

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.

Human rights

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. During the Kosovo crisis in 1999, Khan led the UNHCR team in the Republic of Macedonia. This led to her being appointed as Deputy Director of International Protection later that year.

Amnesty International

Khan joined Amnesty International in 2001 as its Secretary General. 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.

Controversies

As a result of inaccurate media reports, Khan's lawyers issued a correction letter published by the Chaity 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". 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). Outstanding IEC Chairman Peter Pack, a high school teacher, stated that paying off Khan was "the least worst option" available to IEC. 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. The organization was hurt by this scandal and by choosing to pay Khan to leave, with Chairman Pack promising to make amends and move the organization forward following Khan's departure. Naftali Balanson of NGO-Monitor said that the highly usually large payouts caused Amnesty "great damage". She also took issue with Khan's successor's salary since Salil Shetty receives an annual take home pay of $300,000. An independent and confidential report by Dame Anne Owers criticized both the settlements reached with Kahn and her deputy and Amnesty International's management, with Owers finding that the amounts paid were higher than what had been reported by Amnesty, and that Amnesty paid Kahn's legal fees. Owers called the payouts "seriously excessive" and "wholly inappropriate" stating that only half of the amount could be explained as a contractual obligation. Tory MP Philip Davis called the payout "ludicrous," stating the following: "I am sure people making donations to Amnesty, in the belief they are alleviating poverty, never dreamed they are subsidizing a fat cat payout". An anonymous Amnesty donor interviewed by the British daily Express had the following to say on the subject: "I won't be giving any more money. How can this woman lecture the world about abuses and then walk off with this staggering amount of cash?".

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".

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". Much backlash followed in the media. Michael Totten of World Affairs called her a "hysterical heavy-breather". 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". 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." 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". Commentary on Europe's Ariel Cohen said that Khan's statement was a product of being "blinded by a hatred of U.S. policies," "deception or deep[] ignoran[ce]," stating to that statement Khan, reportedly, added "[i]ronic that this should happen as we mark the 60th anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz". Cohen stated that he is "incensed at Amnesty's gall in trivializing [the suffering of prisoners in Soviet gulags that included his grandfather] for political purposes. 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. Roger Kimball of Arma Virumque called it "a preposterous remark". In a letter to the editor of The New York Times, Margers Pinnis demanded that Khan issue "an apology to the peoples of all nations who suffered under the inhuman conditions of the Soviet Union's notorious prison system". 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". Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Myers called it "absolutely irresponsible" The White House spokesman Scott McClellan called the characterization "ridiculous". 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". 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".

In 2010, speaking at a Salford University conference Khan referred to the pre-9/11 British anti-terrorism laws as "draconian," noting that those laws that rendered al-Qaida "a banned organization" in the UK before the 9/11 attacks (keynote lecture at Salford University). Kahn further described the US policy of war on terror as "breathtakingly shameless doublespeak" and a "global web of abuse."

Kahn's criticism of the US government, whether for maintaining the Guantanamo Bay detention facility or otherwise, ended with her installation as IDLO Director General, an organization where the US government plays an active and key role both as a donor and as a member.

According to the workplace information aggregator Glassdoor Khan's current approval rating as IDLO Director General is at 21%, with a number of reviewers—most of whom are current staff but some former IDLO staff—noting "poor direction and management",

Other humanitarian initiatives

Awards

In 2008, she was one of the two finalists for the election of the new Chancellor of the University of Manchester. In July 2009, she was appointed as Chancellor of the University of Salford a post she held until January 2015.

Publications