Amal Clooney: The world’s Most Fascinating Person
Iwas intrigued when I received my invitation to join the 18th MAP International CEO web Conference 2020 the other week. The theme of the conference sounded interesting enough, “a whole New world: Reigniting the stalled Global Economy,” but I was more allured by the name of one of the featured speakers in the top-caliber forum. Her name: amal alamuddin Clooney, who was chosen by top anchorperson, Barbara walters, some years back as the “Most Fascinating Person.” aside from being the wife of famous movieland’s heartthrob, George Clooney, amal is a barrister par excellence and an uncompromising human-rights advocate and staunched media freedom activist.
Amal was born in Beirut during the civil war in Lebanon but her mother, Baria Alamuddin, gave birth to her during a lull in the fighting. Hoping that peace would eventually descend on his ravaged land, her father, Ramzi Alamuddin, named her Amal—the Arabic term for “hope.” She is a mother to fraternal twins, Ella and Alexander. The Clooneys are currently nestled in an elegant house, set on a tiny island in the Thames River called Sonning Eye. The newly married couple bought the place soon after they got married for 10 million euros. It was a lavish honeymoon present which is fast becoming a tourist attraction in Berkshire although parts of the property, including the tennis court and majority of the lawns, were submerged during the epic flood this year.
She studied in Oxford where she earned her Bachelor of Law degree where she received academic awards for academic excellence. She pursued her legal studies in the US where she completed her Master of Law at the New York University School of Law. She was awarded the Jack J. Katz Memorial Award for excellence in entertainment law. Later, she captured the most coveted award in entertainment—the heart of Hollywood’s most eligible bachelor, George Clooney, to whom she has been happily married since September 27, 2014.
She did an internship with Judge Sonia Sotomayor of the US Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit in New York. Sotomayor was later on appointed by President Barack Obama as the 3rd US female Supreme Court Justice after Justices Sandra Day O’connor and the iconic justice, Jane Bader Ginsburg. Amal formally started work as a lawyer at the top law firm, Sullivan and Cromwell, doing sensational cases like Enron. But her heart was more on the pro bono criminal cases which she handled on the side until she realized and asked herself: “I cared more about the outcome of those cases (pro bono) than my paid cases… Why am I not doing more of that kind of work?” So she left her high-paying job and worked at the International Court of Justice at the UN in the Hague where she was getting a meager stipend of $20,000 per annum.
Amal was already a renowned and high achieving international barrister when she met George Cooney in 2013. A year after their marriage, the couple attended the 2015 Golden Globes Award hosted by Tina Fey who acknowledged the power couple: “Amal is a human rights lawyer who worked on the Enron case, was adviser to Kofi Annan regarding Syria,
and was selected for a 3-person U.N. Commission. So tonight her husband is getting a lifetime-achievement award.”
Amal champions the women’s cause. As a mother of a young daughter, she appreciates the work of the #Metoomovement. She has nothing but praise for the courageous women who have come forward and told their stories. Amal expressed the hope that “the future workplace will be safer for my daughter than it was for people of my generation.” Now, a lot of her work deals with abuses and discrimination against women and violation of press freedom. Among her prominent cases include our very own Maria Ressa, Khadija Ismayilova, an investigative reporter who denounced the corruption of the Azerbaijan’s President, and Mohamed Fahmy, Egypt’s bureau chief of Al Jazeera, who was arrested by the Egyptian authorities. Both Ismayilova and Fahmy were released from prisons through Amal’s intervention. She also represented Nobel Prize winner Nadia Murad and former Ukraine Prime Minister Yulia Tymoshenko, and at some point, Julian Assange, in his extradition case.
In her talk at the MAP Conference, Amal emphasized that “what we must remember is that a clampdown on critics—a silencing of dissent—is not a sign of strength but the ultimate sign of weakness. It is a sign that you cannot win in the ‘marketplace of ideas.’” Talking about the Maria Ressa decision, she said that the subliminal message is: “Be quiet or you will be next.”
She stressed that she is not neutral when she hears courageous voices speak up for what is right, and that she will do what she can to amplify them.
In recognition of her valuable work, Prince Charles launched the Amal Clooney Award to give honor to incredible young women of the world. In the same year, Amal was named the special envoy on media freedom by the British Foreign and Commonwealth Office.
In a lengthy Vogue interview, she has high hopes that the system of global justice will emerge and eventually rule the world. She dreams that free speech will be less imperiled and that the government won’t be able to get away easily when it assaults press freedom. And she boldly declared that it is only when the guilty of the world are dragged into the light of judicial process that women and journalists will be able to live in safety. What a truly remarkable and fascinating woman!