Pathbreakers of Arab America—Amal Alamuddin Clooney

posted on: Nov 19, 2025

By: John Mason / Arab America Contributing Writer

This is the one-hundredth in Arab America’s series on American pathbreakers of Arab descent. The series features personalities from various fields, including entertainment, business, sports, science, the arts, academia, journalism, and politics. Our one-hundredth pathbreaker, Amal Clooney, a descendant of Lebanese parents and a refugee, is a highly accomplished legal scholar and practitioner. She is an arch defender of victims of war and other disasters. Here, we highlight her human rights work in aiding victims of two ongoing wars, Ukraine and Gaza.

A refugee herself, Amal Alamuddin Clooney has given legal aid to countless victims of oppressive regimes

Amal Alamuddin was born on February 3, 1978, in Beirut, Lebanon, to a Druze father and a Sunni Muslim mother. When she was two years old, her family moved to the United Kingdom to escape the Lebanese Civil War, settling in Gerrards Cross in Buckinghamshire. Her father, Ramzi, who earned an MBA from the American University of Beirut, returned to Lebanon in 1991, a year after the Lebanese Civil War ended. Her mother, Baria, from Tripoli in the North Governorate, was a political journalist and foreign editor of the London-based newspaper ‘al-Hayat,’ owned by Saudi Arabian prince Khalid bin Sultan Al Saud. Amal has three siblings.

Amal is a British citizen, fluent in English and French, and conversational in Arabic. According to Wikipedia, Amal became engaged to American film star George Clooney on April 28, 2014. They were married in Venice, Italy, and set up their home at the ‘Mill House’ on an island of the River Thames at Sonning Eye. Because she is married to an American, has worked in and has residence in the U.S., and has American children, we consider her to share a similar identity and spirit to Arab Americans.

Clooney was educated in elite schools and colleges in Britain, followed by studies at St Hugh’s College, Oxford, where she graduated with a BA degree in Jurisprudence. Following that, she enrolled at the New York University School of Law to study for an LLM, working one semester in the office of American lawyer and jurist Sonia Sotomayor, who was then a judge for the United States Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit and an NYU Law faculty member. Clooney is qualified to practice law in the United States and England and Wales and was admitted to the bar in New York in 2002. She has practiced at international courts in The Hague, including the International Court of Justice and the International Criminal Court.

Clooney’s legal practice focuses on human rights, representing professionals such as journalists who practice free speech and are punished for it by oppressive regimes. She also represents victims of mass atrocities, including genocide and sexual violence. Clooney previously represented 126 victims of the genocide in Darfur, Sudan. In December 2023, she filed a civil case on behalf of over 800 Yazidi-American plaintiffs against French cement manufacturer Lafarge for conspiring to provide material support to the Salafi jihadist group Islamic State.

An example of Amal Clooney’s commitment to justice—Taking a powerful human rights stand on Russia’s war on Ukraine

In an earlier Arab America column, contributing writer, John Mason, wrote of Clooney’s concern about Russia’s attack on Ukraine and her effort to take the case to the United Nations Security Council. In 2022, she censored that body for ignoring the war crimes against the Ukrainian people, most notably women and children. As a champion of global humanitarian causes, she lent her legal expertise to confront some of the most disturbing abuses of fundamental human rights.

Clooney spoke out at an informal meeting of the United Nations Security Council in New York on Russia’s war on Ukraine. A powerful human rights attorney in her own right, she took the floor and referred to Ukraine, according to Hollywood Life, as a “slaughterhouse…Right in the heart of Europe, where Putin’s aggressive war is so outrageous that even after warnings from the US, and Russia’s long criminal record, Ukrainians could not believe this could happen.”

Amal also joined hands with an international legal task force to investigate Russian war crimes in Ukraine. The work of that task force was to examine war crimes inflicted by Russia’s military on the civilian population of Ukraine. She saw the struggle for justice as just as important and rigorous to implement as warfare itself.

Because Russia is a permanent member of the UN Security Council with veto power, an initiative such as that suggested by Clooney would never gain approval. Thus, she stressed other means for holding Russia responsible for its actions, including accusations that its “soldiers have been accused of killing civilians, kidnapping children and raping women.” Clooney also noted that countries have committed war crimes because they “believe they will get away with it, and they have been right.” While she would like the international community to pursue justice in demanding accountability of Russia for its war crimes, the UN Security Council was not the right space for obtaining such justice.

Clooney criticized for staying ‘silent’ on the Israel-Gaza war, while all the time she was secretly working on it

Clooney was criticized for staying ‘silent’ on the Israel-Gaza war, though she was secretly engaged in working on it. This was revealed in a 2024 article by Rebecca Armitage and Lucia Stein. They reported on how online media speculation about her silence was off the mark, since it was subsequently revealed that “Clooney was busy working with the International Criminal Court (ICC) eight-member expert panel on an investigation involving some of the biggest players in the war.” These names were the leaders of Hamas as well as Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and his Defense Minister Yolav Gallant. Both Israel and Hamas had previously dismissed allegations of war crimes.

Despite a busy caseload, Clooney had agreed to sign on when the ICC prosecutor asked her to assist with “evaluating evidence of suspected war crimes and crimes against humanity in Israel and Gaza.” Armitage and Stein further reported, “But while the reasons for her silence have now been laid bare, the revelation comes amid increasing scrutiny of high-profile figures and their responses to the war in the Middle East.” Furthermore, “As online users demanded more speed and action from their role models on social issues, Clooney quietly put her efforts into the ‘wheels of justice.’”

Following four months of detailed work on the abuses of the Gaza war, Clooney and the other members of the panel of experts averred that they have delivered a “milestone in the history of international criminal law.” Nevertheless, critics of the ICC have argued that “the ICC has a long history of failing to bring the powerful to account and of approaching cases with Western-tinted glasses.”

In response to some of the brouhaha over Clooney’s reaction to the Gaza war human rights tragedy, she explained, “I’m guided by what I’m really outraged about and what I think I can actually try to influence. And it may be that I can only influence things one case at a time, but ultimately, the plan is always to try and improve the system.” As the authors of the piece conclude, “But as a social media storm brewed this year around the role of celebrities in voicing their opinion on Israel’s war in Gaza, Clooney had good reason to remain quiet.”

Clooney has made an enormous and critical contribution to aiding victims of war and other disasters. Her keen legal mind and abundant personal resources have enabled her to raise critical human rights issues. As a refugee herself, Amal is a role model, especially for girls and young women, on how to make a difference in important moral and ethical issues that affect us all, whether overseas or at home.

Sources:
-“Amal Clooney,” Wikipedia, 2025
-“High Powered Attorney Amal Clooney Takes a Human Rights Stand on Russia’s War on Ukraine,” Arab America, authored by John Mason, 5/4/2022
–“Amal Clooney Likens Ukraine to a ‘Slaughterhouse’: Putin’s War is ‘Outrageous’,” Hollywood Life, 4/28/2022
–“Amal Clooney: UN has watched war crimes happen ‘without consequence’,” The Hill, 4/27/2022
–“5 Amazing Facts About Human Rights Lawyer Amal Clooney,” SHARETWEETSHARE, 4/11/2022
-“Amal Clooney was criticised for staying ‘silent’ on the Israel-Gaza war. Then she revealed her secret work,” By Rebecca Armitage and Lucia Stein, 5/21/2024

John Mason, Ph.D., focuses on Arab culture, society, and history and is the author of LEFT-HANDED IN AN ISLAMIC WORLD: An Anthropologist’s Journey into the Middle East, New Academia Publishing, 2017 and of his new novel, WHISPERS FROM THE DESERT: Zaki, a Little Genie’s Tales of Good and Evil (2025), under his pen name, Yahia Al-Banna). He has taught at the University of Libya in Benghazi, Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute in New York, and the American University in Cairo. John served with the United Nations in Tripoli, Libya, and consulted extensively on socioeconomic and political development for USAID and the World Bank in 65 countries.

The views and opinions expressed in this article are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the position of Arab America. The reproduction of this article is permissible with proper credit to Arab America and the author.

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