As a studious, idealistic teenager, living with her family in Dhaka, Irene Khan witnessed conflict first-hand: bloodied bodies in the street, indiscriminate violence, boys just a few years older than herself heading into the fray. This was 1971, as East and West Pakistan slid into the war that would eventually create an independent Bangladesh. The school Khan attended was quickly closed, and from then on she and her two sisters stayed home together, day after day. They saw corpses just outside their windows - the same windows that shattered as stray bullets flew through. "For a 13-year-old," says Khan, "it was like living through a war movie." She and her sisters heard the terrible stories of rape, of soldiers marching from house to house, brutalizing whoever happened to be inside. "I remember the three of us talking about what would happen if the army actually came," she says. "I had figured out that there was a place up in the roof where I could hide behind a water tank, and if they found me, I could jump from there."
Khan had already decided to follow in the footsteps of her barrister grandfather, but what she saw in those months helped her decide how she wanted to practice law, and what she wanted to achieve. "Of course, I was at a very impressionable age," she says, "and what I saw I still remember very vividly. It shaped my approach to law as a means of protecting people's rights, rather than a means of protecting powerful interests."
Khan's concern for human rights has proven persistent. She has been secretary general of the human rights organization Amnesty International for the past seven years, leading a campaign group consisting of 2.2 million worldwide members. This soft-spoken, careful woman presides over a brief that takes in every country, and every manner of abuse, from stoning in Iran ("a particularly heinous way of punishing anyone"), to waterboarding by the US, unlawful killings in Kenya and the "disappearing" of political activists in Libya. And it brings her nose-to-nose with powerful opponents on a daily basis.
Amnesty began in 1961, with an article in the London-based Observer by British lawyer Peter Benenson calling for people to start taking action on human rights and freedom of expression, and specifically to speak for the rights of prisoners of conscience. In the early 1970s, the group published their first report on torture, which showed that it was more widespread than once thought.
There followed decades of successful campaigning - of the 6,000 prisoners that Amnesty campaigned for between 1972 and 1975, for instance, 3,000 were released in that period.
In fact, the campaigns were so successful that when Khan took up the Amnesty post in August 2001, it seemed that arguments about the use of torture had become obsolete in the West, and beyond. A month later, when two planes flew into the World Trade Center, all that changed. The torture debate was open for business, with prominent figures, including the leading American lawyer Alan Dershowitz, suggesting that in the case of a "ticking bomb" scenario, countries would have to reconsider their stance. Dershowitz suggested that a "torture warrant" could be issued by a judge "based on the absolute need to obtain immediate information in order to save lives," although these warrants "would limit the torture to non-lethal means, such as sterile needles being inserted beneath the nails to cause excruciating pain without endangering life."
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