Kumi Naidoo Amnesty International is the largest human rights movement globally, with a global presence including offices in more than 70 countries, 2,600 staff and seven million members, volunteers and supporters worldwide. He opened his first session in Africa. Kumi Naidoo Kumi Naidoo (born 1965) is a South African-born human rights activist of Indian descent who is the current Secretary-General of Amnesty International. Naidoo was the first African head of Greenpeace, an international environmentalist group, serving as its International Executive Director from 2009 to 2015. After battling apartheid in South Africa in the 1970s and 1980s through the Helping Hands Youth Organisation,
Kumi Naidoo mass mobilisation, civil disobedience and for violating the state of emergency. This led him to having to go underground before finally deciding to live in exile in England. During this time Naidoo was a Rhodes scholar at the University of Oxford and he eventually earned a PhD in political sociology. Naidoo's doctorate was earned in the late 1990s, after he returned to England from South Africa. He suspended his studies at Oxford to return to South Africa in 1990 in order to conduct literacy campaigns after the release of Nelson Mandela from prison and Mandela's decision to run for president