Amnesty International’s Secretary General, Agnès Callamard, has been a defender of human rights for most of her life. Her maternal grandfather fought for the French Resistance during the Second World War.
Callamard was born in 1963 into a lower middle-class family in a small village in Southeastern France about 60 kilometres north of Avignon. She attended Sciences Po Grenoble for her undergraduate degree.
Earned a master’s in international and African Studies at the renowned Howard University, a historically Black college in Washington DC where she was one of a handful of White Students – an experience she describes as transformative.
And she received her PhD at the New School in New York City.
Prior to becoming Amnesty’s Secretary General, Callamard was the UN’s Special Rapporteur on Extrajudicial, Summary or Arbitrary Executions and the former Director of the Columbia University Global Freedom of Expression project.
Adrian Harewood sat down with Agnès Callamard in May 2025 at the head office of Amnesty International Canada in downtown Ottawa. We spoke about, growing courage, fighting impunity investigating the murder of the Saudi journalist Jamal Khashoggi, the current state of human rights in the world and the ability of Amnesty International to affect change.
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