Kate Allen (Amnesty International)


Katherine Allen is the Director of Amnesty International UK.

Career

After studying for a BA in Philosophy, Politics and Economics at Brasenose College, University of Oxford, Allen was a policy officer at the Greater London Council, and then Haringey London Borough Council. She was a member of Camden Council during the 1980s where she set up the Women’s Committee.
Allen then moved to the Refugee Council, where she headed the UK emergency evacuation programmes for Bosnia and Kosovo, and chaired the Asylum Rights Campaign during the passage of new asylum and immigration legislation. In 1998/99 she was seconded to the Home Office, where she worked on the 1999 Immigration and Asylum Act.
In 2000, Allen was appointed the UK Director of Amnesty International, the third-largest Amnesty section worldwide with more than a quarter of a million supporters; Allen undertook a major restructure, and established the Human Rights Action Centre in Shoreditch. Having appeared on BBC’s Question Time, in May 2006 she wrote a two-page article in The Observer newspaper, which launched an international campaign on Internet censorship and repression.

Personal life

For 20 years she was the partner of Ken Livingstone, former leader of the Greater London Council, then Member of Parliament, and later the first Mayor of London. The couple's relationship ended in 2001.