Amal Clooney

• 1. Introduction

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  Amal Clooney once stood before the International Criminal Court on behalf of 126 victims of the genocide in Darfur, Sudan. The trial she took part in is the only one that, as of October 2025, has ended in a conviction for crimes against humanity in Darfur. Clooney is a Lebanese, British and French barrister, and her clients have ranged from a former Maldivian president to the founder of WikiLeaks and a Nobel-recognized Yazidi activist. Her name is also tied to one of the most photographed weddings of 2014. How does a child born in Beirut during a civil war end up arguing in the world's highest courts? Why does she keep returning to journalists, survivors and people with almost no power? And what happens when a lawyer tries to teach machines to carry some of that work?

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• 2. Beirut to Oxford

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  Amal Alamuddin was born in Beirut on the 3rd of February 1978. Her father is a Lebanese Druze, and her mother is a Lebanese Sunni Muslim from Tripoli. When she was two years old, her family left Lebanon to escape the civil war there. They settled in Gerrards Cross, in Buckinghamshire. She has a sister named Tala Alamuddin and two half-brothers from her father's first marriage.

  School was Dr Challoner's High School, a girls' grammar school in Little Chalfont. From there she went to St Hugh's College, Oxford, where she earned an exhibition grant and the Shrigley Award. In 2000 she graduated with an upper second-class degree in Jurisprudence. St Hugh's later made her an honorary fellow.

  Next came New York University School of Law, where she studied for an LLM. She won the Jack J. Katz Memorial Award for excellence in entertainment law. For one semester she also worked in the chambers of Sonia Sotomayor, then a judge on the Second Circuit Court of Appeals and a member of the NYU law faculty. That placement would be the first of several apprenticeships with judges at the top of the profession.

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• 3. Apprenticeship in The Hague

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  Before she argued cases in international courts, Clooney spent three years at the New York firm Sullivan & Cromwell. She worked in its Criminal Defense and Investigations Group, and her clients there included Enron and Arthur Andersen. She had been admitted to the New York Bar in 2002.

  In 2004 she completed a clerkship at the International Court of Justice. She served under three judges: Vladlen S. Vereshchetin of Russia, Nabil Elaraby of Egypt and the ad hoc judge Franklin Berman of the United Kingdom. She then stayed in The Hague as judicial assistant to Patrick Robinson, the presiding judge at the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia. The case before that bench charged Slobodan Milosevic with crimes allegedly committed in Kosovo, Croatia and Bosnia.

  Later she crossed to the prosecution side at the Special Tribunal for Lebanon. There she prosecuted five members of Hezbollah accused of the 2005 killing of former Prime Minister Hariri and others. In 2010 she was called to the Bar of England and Wales at Inner Temple, and she now practises from Doughty Street Chambers. Her years inside tribunals gave her a working knowledge of how courts can be pushed to act, and she soon turned that knowledge to the defence of reporters.

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• 4. Journalists Under Fire

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  In September 2017, ten Rohingya men were killed in the village of Inn Din in Myanmar. Two Reuters reporters, Wa Lone and Kyaw Soe Oo, were sentenced to seven years in prison for reporting on those murders. Clooney joined their international legal team in March 2018, and both men were freed in May 2019.

  That summer she took on another press-freedom fight. In July 2019 she and the Irish barrister Caoilfhionn Gallagher began leading the international legal team for the Filipino-American journalist Maria Ressa. Ressa faces charges that could mean decades in prison.

  The same year, Lord Neuberger appointed Clooney as the first deputy chair of the High Level Panel of Legal Experts on Media Freedom. The UK foreign secretary also named her special envoy on media freedom for 2019-2020. Her client list in this area runs further: the Maldivian former president Mohamed Nasheed, the Azerbaijani journalist Khadija Ismayilova and the Egyptian-Canadian journalist Mohamed Fahmy.

  She also wrote in public on their behalf. In 2015 she published pieces urging Egypt to send Fahmy home to Canada and calling for the Maldives to release Nasheed. In 2017 she co-authored an article on the right to insult in international law, a question that sits close to every press-freedom case she takes.

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• 5. Genocide on Trial

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  In January 2015, Clooney joined a legal team representing Armenia before the European Court of Human Rights. The appeal was against Doğu Perinçek, a Turkish politician convicted for denying the Armenian genocide.

  The courtroom later moved to the victims of the Islamic State. In November 2021 Clooney was co-counsel for the plaintiffs and victims in a case against Taha al-Jumailly. He became the first Islamic State member convicted of genocide and crimes against humanity, and he received a life sentence. She also acted as co-counsel for the plaintiffs against his ex-wife, the German-born Jennifer Wenisch, who was sentenced to 14 years in prison for crimes against humanity, war crimes and membership in a foreign terrorist organization.

  The defendant in the Darfur trial, Ali Muhammad Ali Abd-Al-Rahman, was a senior leader of the pro-government janjaweed fighters.

  In December 2023 she turned from criminal courts to a civil suit in the United States. She filed on behalf of more than 800 Yazidi-American plaintiffs against the French cement manufacturer Lafarge. The suit alleges that the company conspired to provide material support to the Islamic State, and it seeks compensation for the Yazidi people. Her long-time client Nadia Murad is the lead plaintiff. Clooney has also addressed the United Nations Security Council on sexual violence in conflict.

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• 6. Ukraine and Gaza

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  After Russia invaded Ukraine in 2022, Clooney and other prominent human rights lawyers led a legal task force created at the request of the Ukrainian government. Its job was to map routes to criminal accountability for Russia through national courts, the International Criminal Court and the United Nations. President Volodymyr Zelenskyy also appointed her to a group of international legal experts advising on how survivors of the conflict might claim compensation.

  On the 27th of April 2022 she spoke at a UN Security Council Arria-Formula Meeting titled Ensuring Accountability for Atrocities Committed by Russia in Ukraine.

  In January 2024, ICC prosecutor Karim Ahmad Khan convened an advisory panel to review his investigation into possible war crimes in the Gaza war. Clooney and five other legal experts sat on it. Their recommendation was unanimous: seek arrest warrants for five people. Those named were the Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu, the Hamas leader in Gaza Yahya Sinwar, two other Hamas leaders and the Israeli defence minister Yoav Gallant.

  In her statement, Clooney said there were "reasonable grounds to believe" that all five had committed war crimes and crimes against humanity. The panel's work was announced in May 2024. On the 20th of May 2024 the Financial Times published an op-ed by Clooney and the other panel members.

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• 7. Foundation and the AI Question

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  In 2016, Clooney and her husband George founded the Clooney Foundation for Justice. It offers free legal aid in defence of free speech and women's rights in more than 40 countries. Its first initiative, TrialWatch, supports unfairly imprisoned journalists and monitors trials. The second, Waging Justice for Women, backs women and girls facing discrimination, child marriage and violence.

  The foundation says its work has helped free dozens of journalists and given thousands of women legal support. In 2022 it partnered with the Obama Foundation's Girls Opportunity Alliance and with Melinda French Gates to advance gender equality and reduce child marriage. It also runs a fellowship to help young women lawyers across Africa launch careers in human rights.

  In 2024, the law professor Margaret Satterthwaite, then the UN special rapporteur on the independence of judges and lawyers, praised its "crucial work...to make sure brave justice advocates can continue to advance human rights despite threats, criminalization, and harassment."

  The arithmetic that worries Clooney appeared in 2026, in a report on Malawi. She said 10% of girls under fifteen there are forced into marriage, yet the country of 22 million people has only 800 lawyers. Working with the Women Lawyers Association and Oxford's Blavatnik School of Government, the foundation is building an AI chatbot. It can point a user to the nearest lawyer, draft common remedies such as protection orders, and help survivors prepare those requests.

  That idea grew into the Oxford Institute of Technology and Justice, which Clooney co-founded in October 2025 with the foundation.

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• 8. Teaching, Giving and Home

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  From 2015 to 2025, Clooney was a visiting faculty member and senior fellow at Columbia Law School's Human Rights Institute. She co-taught the Human Rights Course there with Professor Sarah Cleveland. She has also lectured on international criminal law at SOAS in London, the New School in New York, the Hague Academy of International Law and the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. In 2025 she became a professor of practice at Oxford's Blavatnik School of Government.

  Her scholarship includes Special Tribunal for Lebanon: Law and Practice, co-edited with D. Tolbert and N. Jurdi and published by Oxford University Press in 2014. The American Society of International Law honoured it, and the UK Supreme Court has cited it. In 2024 she co-edited Freedom of Speech in International Law with David Neuberger.

  Her giving with George has been specific. In 2017 they awarded a $1 million grant to the Southern Poverty Law Center to combat hate groups. In 2018 they pledged $500,000 to the March for Our Lives. After the 2020 Beirut explosion they gave $100,000 to three Lebanese charities. Later that year they donated $1 million to coronavirus relief, including a gift that helped The Mill at Sonning Theatre survive the pandemic.

  They met through a mutual friend in July 2013 and became engaged on the 28th of April 2014. They married on the 27th of September 2014 at Ca' Farsetti in Venice, in a ceremony led by the Italian politician Walter Veltroni. That October the couple bought the Mill House on the River Thames at Sonning Eye for around £10 million. In June 2017 she gave birth to fraternal twins, a girl and a boy.

  Recognition has followed, including a place on the BBC's 100 Women list in 2023 and Time magazine's Woman of the Year in 2022. In 2024 she received a Legal 500 Lawyer of the Year award.

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