Excessive Payouts To Senior Staff
In February 2011, newspaper stories in the UK revealed that Irene Khan had received a payment of UK £533,103 from Amnesty International following her resignation from the organisation on 31 December 2009, a fact discovered in Amnesty's records for the 2009–2010 financial year. The sum paid to her was in excess of four times her annual salary of £132,490. The deputy secretary general, Kate Gilmore – who also resigned in December 2009 – received an ex-gratia payment of £320,000. Peter Pack, the chairman of Amnesty's international executive committee, said on 19 February 2011, "The payments to outgoing secretary general Irene Khan shown in the accounts of AI (Amnesty International) Ltd for the year ending 31 March 2010 include payments made as part of a confidential agreement between AI Ltd and Irene Khan." and that "It is a term of this agreement that no further comment on it will be made by either party." On 21 February Pack issued a further statement, in which he said that the payment was a "unique situation" that was "in the best interest of Amnesty’s work" and that there would be no repetition of it. He stated that "the new secretary general, with the full support of the IEC, has initiated a process to review our employment policies and procedures to ensure that such a situation does not happen again." Pack also stated that Amnesty was "fully committed to applying all the resources that we receive from our millions of supporters to the fight for human rights". In a letter to the "movement" dated 25 February, Pack offered additional details, which in turn had been made public by Amnesty International Netherlands. According to this statement Irene Khan, being reluctant to retire at the end of her second term, the International Executive Committee offered her additional termination benefits, payment of back salary, bonuses and other inducements to leave. UK employment law offering additional protections to fixed-term employees had given Khan leverage to ask for termination benefits. The alternatives, according to Pack, would have been her continuation in office, or an official dismissal which might have led to litigation.
Read more about this topic: Criticism Of Amnesty International
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