Amnesty's opposition to Guantanamo has been longstanding and vociferous, with Khan causing a storm in 2005 with her description of the prison as "the gulag of our time." Responding to this description, Bush referred to it four times in one news conference as "absurd" and said that he felt that Amnesty "based some of their decisions on the word of, and the allegations by, people that were held in detention, people who hate America, people who have been trained in some instances to disassemble, that means not to tell the truth." (He is thought to have meant "dissemble.")
Amnesty's choice of targets in the past few years has inevitably led to claims that the organization is prejudiced against the US. Khan insists, however, that the group is neither anti- nor pro-American, and that it addresses human rights abuses by the US "in the same way that we condemn what happens in Sudan or Iran or Saudi Arabia." What has happened, she says, is that the so-called war on terror has brought "a real backlash on human rights, setting back progress for decades. It's not only what the US has done - it's the message that has gone to others, who have used it as a license to continue setting back human rights.
Khan had a distinctly political upbringing. She stayed in Bangladesh with her doctor father and full-time mother until 1973, when she left to study abroad. The education system in Bangladesh had crumbled after the war, so when some foreign friends who were part of the relief effort suggested that the teenager might do better elsewhere, her parents agreed. They didn't realize quite what was involved in sending her to Northern Ireland, however.
"My parents had never been outside the Indian subcontinent," says Khan, "and they had no idea what was happening in Northern Ireland. It was quite amusing when I arrived there [in Kilkeel, County Down], because the violence was of a lower level than what I had come through. There were bombs, and IRA attacks and so on, but I remember commenting that in Bangladesh there was no tradition of a bomb being planted and then someone phoning in to say that there was a bomb ... . Of course, the situation in Northern Ireland was actually terrible at that time - this was 1973 to 1975. I went from one war of liberation, to another war, a civil war ... . I saw what war does to people, to human beings, and how it divides communities."
Khan went on to study law at Manchester University and Harvard before working for the International Commission of Jurists and the UN High Commission for Refugees, where she spent 20 years. She now lives in London.
She describes a meeting, last November, with a Japanese woman who had been a "comfort woman" - forced into prostitution by the Japanese army during the second world war - and who took Khan's hand "and said that the most important thing for her was that what she had suffered was being acknowledged now. Even decades later. This business about justice being acknowledged, or suffering being acknowledged," says Khan, "is really very important''
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