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About
Agnès Paulette Solange Callamard (born March 14, 1963, in Grenoble, France) is a prominent French human rights expert, activist, and scholar. She earned a master's degree in political science from Sciences Po Paris in 1986 and a PhD in international relations from the New School for Social Research in New York in 1995. Her academic background focused on human rights, international law, and freedom of expression. Callamard began her career in the 1990s with human rights organizations including Article 19, advocating for freedom of expression. She served as Director of the Columbia University Global Freedom of Expression project from 2013 to 2016. In 2016, she was appointed by the United Nations Human Rights Council as the Special Rapporteur on extrajudicial, summary, or arbitrary executions, a position she held until 2021. During this tenure, she led the high-profile 2019 investigation into the 2018 murder of Saudi journalist Jamal Khashoggi in Istanbul, concluding it was an extrajudicial execution for which the Saudi state bore responsibility. Since March 2021, she has served as Secretary General of Amnesty International, overseeing global efforts to combat human rights abuses while continuing to address issues like arbitrary detention, enforced disappearances, and threats to civil liberties. She remains a vocal critic of authoritarian regimes and defender of journalistic freedoms.