By Robert Pirrie WS
The Keeper of the Signet, Lord Mackay of Clashfern KT, and the trustees of the WS Society, led by Deputy Keeper of the Signet Amanda Laurie WS, are delighted to welcome the internationally recognised barrister Amal Clooney as the latest member of the group of distinguished Fellows of the WS Society. Accepting the award of Fellow, Ms Clooney expressed her thanks to the trustees “for considering me for this honour alongside distinguished colleagues who I consider mentors and friends”. Ranked in the legal directories as a leading barrister in international human rights law, public international law, and international criminal law, Clooney is described as “a brilliant legal mind” who “handles cases of real international importance” and has a “passionate commitment to the law and compassion for people it serves”.
In her role representing victims of mass atrocities, genocide and sexual violence, Clooney has acted in many precedent-setting human rights cases, including the first prosecution of a member of ISIS for genocide, and the first case alleging complicity in crimes against humanity by a company that funded the terror group. At the European Court of Human Rights she represented Armenia in a case involving the Armenian genocide of 1915-16 when over 1.5 million Armenians were killed by the Turks of the Ottoman Empire. She has also acted as counsel to 126 victims of the recent genocide in Darfur, Sudan and this year was appointed Special Advisor to the Prosecutor of the International Criminal Court on Darfur. Clooney also represents political prisoners across the globe and has acted for many journalists arbitrarily imprisoned for their work around the world. In this context, from 2019 -2021 she served as deputy chair of the High Level Panel of Legal Experts on Media Freedom, chaired by another Fellow of the WS Society, former UK Supreme Court President Lord Neuberger. She is also a Visiting Professor at Columbia Law School where she teaches the Human Rights course with Professor Sarah Cleveland and she is co-founder of the Clooney Foundation for Justice, which aims to advance justice through accountability for human rights abuses around the world.
Clooney is qualified to practice law in the United States of America and in England and Wales. Born in Beirut her family left Lebanon during the Lebanese Civil War when she was four years old and settled in Buckinghamshire in the United Kingdom. Clooney graduated with a BA in Jurisprudence from St Hugh’s College Oxford in 2000 and then attended New York University School of Law to study for the LLM. While there she worked in the office of Sonia Sotomayor, the future Associate Justice of the US Supreme Court, then a judge for the US Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit. In 2002, Clooney was admitted to the bar in New York and worked as a litigation attorney at Sullivan and Cromwell LLP in the city and completed a judicial clerkship at the International Court of Justice in 2004. Subsequently she was based at the Hague working in the Office of the Prosecutor at the UN Special Tribunal for Lebanon and at the International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia. In 2010, Clooney was admitted to the Bar of England & Wales, Inner Temple and joined Doughty Street Chambers that same year, where she continues to work today as a practising barrister.
As well as her role with Doughty Street, Clooney also served as senior advisor to Kofi Annan when he was the UN’s Envoy on Syria, as Counsel to the UN Inquiry on the use of armed drones and as a rapporteur for the International Bar Association’s Human Right’s Institute on the independence of the judiciary. She is also a member of the United Kingdom’s team of experts on preventing sexual violence in conflict zones and the UK Attorney General’s panel of experts on public international law.
Amongst all these impressive achievements, Clooney’s work with Yazidi women is some of the most striking and remarkable of her career so far. From August 2014 in Iraq and Syria, the Yazidi community — a religious minority indigenous to the Kurdish regions — was targeted by ISIS through an organised campaign of executions, enslavement, sexual violence and the forced recruitment of child soldiers. An estimated 400,000 Yazidis were compulsorily displaced from their homes. Clooney has represented a number of Iraqi victims from the Yazidi community, seeking accountability for genocide, sexual violence, torture and other mass atrocities perpetrated by ISIS. This included cases against individuals within ISIS, such as representing a Yazidi woman whose five-year-old daughter had been enslaved, tortured and killed by a member of the group. Ms Clooney also represents victims in the first known case in the world where a member of ISIS faced charges of genocide under universal jurisdiction in Germany, Prosecutor v. Taha A-J. Speaking on the day he was convicted just last month, Clooney observed, “This is the moment Yazidis have been waiting for. To finally hear a judge, after 7 years, declare that what they suffered was genocide … I am in awe of my client’s courage and grateful to Germany for defending the principle of universal jurisdiction which means that crimes like this must be prosecuted wherever and whenever they occur”.
In another ground-breaking judgement, on 7th September 2021, the French Supreme Court approved the indictments of the French multinational cement company LafargeHolcim SA for complicity in crimes against humanity and financing of terrorism committed by ISIS and other armed groups in Syria. In her role as victims’ counsel, Clooney commented, “Today’s judgment by the French Supreme Court is a huge step forward for victims of crimes committed by ISIS and for survivors all over the world fighting for justice. Corporations should take note: if they are complicit in human rights violations they will be held to account and victims will be entitled to reparations”.
Nadia Murad, another Yazidi client of Clooney’s, received the Nobel Peace Prize in 2018 in recognition of her human rights activism and her “efforts to end the use of sexual violence as a weapon of war and armed conflict”. Murad was born in 1993 in a Northern Iraqi village populated mostly by Kurds of the Yazidi faith. She was a 21-year-old student in 2014 when ISIS overran the village, killing 600 people from her community, including her mother, six brothers and stepbrothers. Murad and the other younger women and girls were taken into slavery by ISIS fighters, joining more than 6,700 Yazidi women and girls taken prisoner by Islamic State in Iraq. Held as a slave in the city of Mosul she was repeatedly beaten, burnt with cigarettes, and raped before managing to escape sometime around September- November 2014, when her captor left the house unlocked. Taken in by a neighbouring family, she was eventually smuggled out of ISIS territory and successfully made her way to a refugee camp in Duhok in the Kurdistan region. In 2015, she was one of 1,000 women and children who benefited from a refugee programme of the Government of Baden-Wurttemberg in Southwest Germany, and this country became her home. During this same year she began to speak publicly about her ordeal and in December became the first person to appear before the United Nations Security Council to brief them about human trafficking. In 2016, Murad and Clooney appeared together before the United Nations, where the barrister explained she and Murad had agreed she would represent Murad in a legal action against ISIS commanders, whose crimes of genocide, rape and trafficking Clooney unforgettably described as a “bureaucracy of evil on an industrial scale”.
“I wish I could say that I was proud to be here. But I’m not. I am ashamed as a supporter of the United Nations that states are failing to prevent or even punish genocide because they find that their own interests get in the way. I am ashamed as a lawyer that there is no justice being done and barely a complaint being made about it.”
Legal directories highlight Clooney’s “superb advocacy”, her “commanding presence before courts” and describe her as “a dream performer before international tribunals”. They also emphasise that she has an ability to galvanise “heads of state, foreign ministers and business… in a way that is very effective” for victims of human rights abuses. All these qualities are abundantly apparent in her representation of Nadia Murad. In her first speech with Murad at the UN in 2016, Clooney recounts the young woman’s story, emphasising that these unspeakably horrific events happened “just two summers ago”. Sitting alongside her lawyer, clearly still deeply traumatised by all she has endured, Murad listens intently to the translation through an earpiece, her eyes downcast. There is a charged atmosphere in the UN Chamber and Clooney, although poised and professional, speaks with unmistakable, if contained, emotion and anger. As she talks of the murders of Murad’s family, the young Yazidi woman begins to silently weep. “This is the first time I have spoken in this chamber” Clooney continues. “I wish I could say that I was proud to be here. But I’m not. I am ashamed as a supporter of the United Nations that states are failing to prevent or even punish genocide because they find that their own interests get in the way. I am ashamed as a lawyer that there is no justice being done and barely a complaint being made about it. I am ashamed as a woman that girls like Nadia can have their bodies sold and used as battlefields. I am ashamed as a human being that we ignore their cries for help”. A burst of applause rings out around the hushed chamber at this point in Clooney’s remarks, a woman stands in the audience, clapping with her hands above her head. Concluding her address, in a deeply moving moment, Clooney turns to face Murad, saying “I am proud to sit beside this young woman, whose strength and leadership astound me. She has defied all the labels that life has given her: orphan; rape-victim; slave; refugee. She has instead created new ones: survivor; Yazidi leader; women’s advocate; Nobel Peace Prize nominee; and now, from today, UN ODC Goodwill Ambassador. I am proud to know you Nadia, and I am sorry that we have failed you. And to those that thought that by their acts they could destroy you, let them know this: Nadia Murad’s spirit is not broken, and her voice will not be silenced because as of today Nadia is a United Nations Ambassador who will speak for survivors all over the world”.
“When survivors seek justice, they look for someone to give them hope that justice is possible. Amal gave me and many survivors hope that we will achieve justice.”
In the next few years Clooney and Murad appeared several times at the UN, challenging world leaders over inaction in tackling ISIS war crimes. In the UN Chamber and in television interviews Clooney makes clear that it is not enough to defeat ISIS on the battlefield. “What we want”, she told CNN in 2019, “is to see ISIS in a courtroom. These are some of the worst crimes of our generation and as an international lawyer I wanted to try and help Nadia and people like her. At the moment ISIS is leaving a trail of evidence and no one is collecting it”. In another interview Clooney comments that she is sometimes asked, “Don’t the victims just prefer to move on with their lives instead of pursuing justice and having to go through these harrowing interviews?” The point she always makes, Clooney says, is that “they can’t move on, and they deserve better than the response that they’re getting. Nadia was incredible in her determination to achieve some justice for her community”. Following the first genocide conviction last month, Murad stated that “When survivors seek justice, they look for someone to give them hope that justice is possible. Amal gave me and many survivors hope that we will achieve justice. I am grateful to Amal for her tireless work to bring ISIS members to court”. Clooney and Murad continue to fight for justice for the Yazidis in courtrooms around the world.
A passionate belief in justice and the crucial role of the rule of law, both in liberal democracies and worldwide, are touchstones in all of Clooney’s work. In pursuing justice across the globe, ISIS are not the only dangerous adversary she has faced. When representing the former President of the Maldives, Mohamed Nasheed in 2015, Clooney arrived in the islands to visit her client in prison just days after another of his defence team had been stabbed in the head on the streets of the capital city. Nasheed, the first democratically elected leader of the Maldives following his victory in the 2008 election, was forced to resign at gunpoint in 2013, then sentenced to 13 years in prison during what Clooney called “a politically motivated show trial”. For his climate change activism and human rights campaigning, Nasheed had sometimes been called “The Mandela of the Maldives” and many powerful political forces in the Maldives opposed his Presidency. Subsequently, on 5 October 2015, at a press conference held at Doughty Street Chambers in London, Clooney was able to announce the UN had found for her and her co-counsel, agreeing that Nasheed’s imprisonment was illegal on a number of grounds. As she makes clear, Nasheed’s “trial” left a lot to be desired in terms of judicial propriety: the UN agreed with Clooney “there was overwhelming evidence his trial was unfair”. A particularly colourful example of a due-process violation Clooney cites is that Nasheed was not allowed to call any witnesses or evidence on his own behalf. As a further illustration of just how blatantly unfair the trial was, Clooney recalls “two of the three judges were actually witnesses for the prosecution”. The following year, having secured Nasheed’s temporary release from prison on medical grounds, Clooney made sure no one would forget the failures of the justice system in the Maldives: “Maldivian judges don’t have law degrees. The State Department says 25% of them have criminal records, so we use the word ‘court’ very loosely”.
Clooney also represents Maria Ressa an award-winning Filipino journalist facing over 100 years in prison in Manila based on spurious charges including ‘cyber-libel’. In 2021, Maria was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize for her “courageous fight for freedom of expression in the Philippines”.
It has been noted in the press that thanks to Clooney, more and more members of the public have an idea of the crucial importance of human rights law and the lawyers that practice it internationally. Leaders in the field such as Clooney, and Professor Thuli Madonsela, admitted as a Fellow of the WS Society in 2020, are examples of truly inspirational lawyers who can engage new generations from a diverse range of backgrounds and experiences, and, by their example, encourage them to consider joining the legal profession as a means of instigating change and improving the lives of people across the globe. As has been shown time and again in recent history, such advocacy can be particularly potent and powerful when it is exercised on behalf of formerly neglected or exploited groups in society. These are exactly the sort of lawyers the WS Society — with its 500 years of history ensuring all in society have access to the best lawyers and legal advice — wishes to see represented amongst its august body of Fellows. As Clooney herself explained in 2016, she chose the field of international human rights law because, “if you are a lawyer and you want to take on easier cases, you can prosecute traffic violations or something. You’d have a very high rate of success, and you’d probably sleep more easily at night. But that’s not what drives me. I want to work on cases that I feel most passionate about”.
This article appears in the January 2022 edition of Signet magazine. If you would like to receive the magazine, email ssossi@wssociety.co.uk