Agnès Callamard

She returned to Amnesty International after twenty years, as Secretary General, in March 2021. She leads the organization's human-rights work and is its chief spokesperson. She is responsible for providing overall leadership of the International Secretariat, including setting the strategic direction for the organisation and managing relations with Amnesty International’s national entities.

In May 2017, Callamard attended a conference in the Philippines, which was followed by her Wikipedia page being vandalized. Callamard stated that the visit was not in an official capacity.

Callamard was the United Nations Special Rapporteur on extrajudicial, summary or arbitrary executions, appointed by the UN Human Rights Council resolution A/HRC/RES/35/15 of 22 June 2017 for a 3 years mandate and finishing on 31 March 2021. In 2019 she led the human rights inquiry into the assassination of Saudi journalist Jamal Khashoggi. Her findings were presented to the UN Human Rights Council in June 2019. After the report was published, she said that a senior Saudi official twice threatened to have her killed if she was not reined in by the UN.

In 2016 she was nominated by France to become the fourth OSCE Special Representative on Freedom of the Media. Despite being a popular choice to replace Dunja Mijatović her nomination was strongly opposed by Russia and other eastern European countries.

In January 2013, Callamard tweeted that Shimon Peres had supposedly admitted in a New York Times interview that Yasser Arafat was murdered. In April 2021, Amnesty International released a statement that the tweet was not reflective of the position of Amnesty International or Callamard. Jewish News wrote "[t]he tweet was still available on Callamard's account".

In November 2013, Callamard was appointed Director of Columbia University's Global Freedom of Expression initiative.

In October 2004, Callamard took the position of Executive Director of Article 19, an international human-rights organization.

In 2001, Callamard was the founding director of HAP International (the Humanitarian Accountability Partnership, created in 2003) where she oversaw field trials in Afghanistan, Cambodia and Sierra Leone and created an international self-regulatory body for humanitarian agencies committed to strengthening accountability to disaster-affected populations. She was in this position until 2004.

From 1998 to 2001, Callamard was Chef de Cabinet for the Secretary General of Amnesty International and the organisation's Research Policy Coordinator.

Callamard received her undergraduate degree from the Institut d'Etudes Politiques de Grenoble in 1985. She earned a master's degree in international and African studies from Howard University in 1988. Callamard received a PhD in Political Science from the New School for Social Research in New York City, with a thesis titled "Populations Under Fire, Population Under Stress: A Study of Mozambican Refugees and Malawian villagers in Malawi" in 1995.