Amal Clooney

At 46 years old, Amal Clooney has this physical status:

Amal Clooney (born 3 February 1978) is a Lebanese-British barrister at Doughty Street Chambers, specialising in international law and human rights.

Julian Assange, the founder of WikiLeaks, is among her clients; Yulia Tymoshenko, Ukraine's former prime minister; Egyptian-Canadian journalist Mohamed Fahmy; and Nobel Prize Laureate Nadia Murad.

Early life and family

Amal Alamuddin Clooney was born in Beirut, Lebanon. Her first name is amal in Arabic, which means "hope."

Her family immigrated to Lebanon when she was two years old, during the Lebanese Civil War, and settled in Gerrards Cross, Buckinghamshire. Ramzi Alamuddin, a Lebanese Druze from Baakline's Chouf District, earned his MBA degree from the American University of Beirut. After the liberation war, he returned to Lebanon in 1991. Bariaa (née Miknass) is a mother of a Sunni Muslims from Tripoli, Northern Lebanon, and she is a political journalist and foreign editor of the Pan-Arab newspaper al-Hayat. She is the founder of International Communication Experts, a multinational company that specializes in celebrity guest bookings, public relations, and event promotion.

Clooney has three children: one sister and two half-brothers from her father's first marriage.

Before attending university, Clooney attended Dr Challoner's High School, a girls' grammar school located in Little Chalfont, Buckinghamshire. She then studied at St Hugh's College, Oxford, where she received an exhibition grant and the Shrigley Award. In 2000, she earned a Bachelor of Arts (BA) degree in jurisprudence. Following the year, she began attending the Master of Laws (LL.M) degree at New York University School of Law. She was honoured with the Jack J. Katz Memorial Award for excellence in entertainment law. She spent a semester at NYU in the office of Sonia Sotomayor, then as a judge for the United States Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit and a member of the NYU Law faculty.

Personal life

Clooney is fluent in English and French, as well as conversational in Arabic.

On April 28, 2014, she proposed to actor George Clooney. They first met through a mutual friend in July 2013. The couple obtained marriage licenses in Kensington and Chelsea, London, on August 7, 2014. They married in Venice's city hall on September 27th, 2014 (at Ca' Farsetti), two days after a high-profile wedding reception two days earlier, also in Venice. Clooney's cousin Walter Veltroni, the former mayor of Rome, married them. The wedding was widely covered in the media. The Clooneys had purchased the Mill House on an island in Sonning Eye, England, costing around £10 million.

It was announced by CBS talk show The Talk that Clooney was pregnant in February 2017. To Entertainment Tonight, friend Matt Damon announced the pregnancy. She gave birth to fraternal twins in June 2017.

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Career

Clooney is licensed to practice law in the United States, England, and Wales. She was admitted to the bar in New York in 2002 and then admitted to the Bar of England and Wales in 2010. She has also worked at international courts in The Hague, including the International Court of Justice and the International Criminal Court.

Clooney spent three years with Sullivan & Cromwell in New York City as part of the Criminal Defense and Investigations Group, where her clients included Enron and Arthur Andersen.

Judge Nabil Elaraby from Egypt, Judge Nabil Elaraby from Egypt, and Ad hoc Judge Sir Franklin Berman from the United Kingdom completed a judicial clerkship at the International Court of Justice in 2004.

She was then based in The Hague, working in the Office of the Prosecutor's in Lebanon and the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia, where she served as Judicial assistant to Judge Patrick Robinson, Presiding Judge. During the conflict in former Yugoslavia, the case charged the former President of the former Yugoslavia with violent crimes committed in Kosovo, Croatia, and Bosnia.

Clooney was called to the Bar of England & Wales in Inner Temple in 2010. She is a practising barrister at Doughty Street Chambers. Clooney is ranked as a leading barrister in international human rights law, international treaty, and international criminal law. She is described as a "brillant legal mind" who "handles cases of real international significance" and "knows her briefing inside out." She is described as a "natural lead advocate" and a "rare combination of intellectual bread and pragmatism" in a 'tactically first class' and a 'true combination of intellectual breadth and pragmatism. The directors also emphasize her "superb advocacy" and "commanding presence before the courts," as they also refer to her as a "dream performer" before international tribunals. They also claim that she is 'fantastically innovative' with the ability to mobilize 'heads of state, foreign ministers, and industry... in a way that is especially helpful to victims of human rights abuses. She has been described as 'unafraid to raise novel points of legislation,'very innovative in pushing the boundaries, and with a 'passionate dedication to the law and compassion for the people it serves'.

Clooney represents clients in international courts, including the International Criminal Court, the International Court of Justice, and the European Court of Human Rights. She represents a group of Iraqi civilians wounded by ISIS, including genocide and sexual violence, and she is a spokesperson for Nobel Peace Prize Laurette Nadia Murad. In a landmark lawsuit, Clooney is now representing Yazidi victims, alleging complicity in crimes against humanity perpetrated by a French firm called Lafarge for reportedly funding ISIS to keep open a plant in northern Syria that existed between 2011 and 2014. Clooney was co-plaintiff's and victims' counsel in the first case in which an ISIS member was found guilty of genocide and sentenced to life in prison in 2021.

Clooney regularly appears in newspapers and is currently in charge of the international counsel team representing Filipino journalist and CEO Maria Ressa, a news organisation. Ressa is facing a string of criminal charges that could result in up to 100 years in prison. Ressa was given the Nobel Peace Prize in 2021 for her 'courageous struggle for expression in the Philippines.' Clooney was previously for Wa Lone and Kyaw Soe Oo, two Myanmar journalists who were sentenced to seven years in jail for reporting on Myanmar's attacks against Rohingyas. They were first introduced in May 2019.

Clooney has been a visiting faculty member and a senior fellow at Columbia Law School's Human Rights Institute, where she co-teaches the Human Rights Course with Professor Sarah H. Cleveland. Clooney has also lectured students on international criminal law at the SOAS School of Law in London, The Hague Academy of International Law in New York City, The Hague Academy of International Law, and the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.

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Awards and honours

• Clooney was chosen as Barbara Walters' Most Fascinating Person of 2014. At the 2014 British Fashion Awards, she was shortlisted for Best British Style alongside David Beckham, Kate Moss, Keira Knightley and Emma Watson.
• 2016 World Economic Forum Young Global Leader.
• 2018 United Nations Correspondents Association Global Citizen of the Year Award.
• In 2019, Prince Charles launched the Amal Clooney Award to celebrate 'incredible young women'.
• The Simon Wiesenthal Center honoured Amal and George Clooney with its Humanitarian Award at its 2020 virtual gala.
• 2020 Committee to Protect Journalists Gwen Ifill Award for "extraordinary and sustained achievement in the cause of press freedom".
• 2021 Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press' 'Freedom of the Press Award'.
• American Society of International Law 'Champion of the International Rule of Law' Award.
• In 2021, the National Underground Railroad Freedom Center's recognised Amal and George Clooney for their work in social justice and modern-day freedom efforts at the International Freedom Conductor Awards Gala.
• 2021, Fellow of The Society of Writers to Her Majesty's Signet (known as the WS Society)
• 2022, Time magazine, Woman of the Year.