George Clooney s new wife Amal Alamuddin may be turning heads and setting tongues wagging in Venice Hollywood and beyond but she s no arm candy. Those in the international circles in which they travel say Clooney is lucky to have her.
Born to Lebanese Druze parents in 1978 during the height of the Lebanese Civil War she and her family left for London when she was two years old. Her mother Baria Alamuddin is an award winning journalist and foreign editor of the pan Arab newspaper Al Hayat while her father is a retired professor from American University of Beirut.
Alamuddin studied law at both NYU s Law School and at Oxford where she earned her degree in 2000. While at NYU she was a student law clerk on the U.S. Court of Appeals for future Supreme Court Justice Sonia Sotomayor and later clerked for three years at the International Court of Justice.
She has since become an accomplished and feisty human rights lawyer. In London she has practiced at the Doughty Street Chambers firm and represented the likes of WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange and former Ukrainian Prime Minister Yulia Tymoshenko. She has worked in the Office of the Prosecutor at the UN Special Tribunal for Lebanon and at the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia.
She has also been an appointed to several UN panels where she has acted as an advisor to former UN Secretary General Kofi Anan on Syria and was counsel on the 2013 inquiry into the use of U.S. armed drones in counter terrorism operations in places like Pakistan Somalia and Yemen.
This year after the latest Israel Gaza war she was reportedly invited to join the UN s commission investigating possible war crimes in Gaza but turned down the appointment.
I am honored to have received the offer but given existing commitments including eight ongoing cases unfortunately could not accept this role she said in a statement at the time. I wish my colleagues who will serve on the commission courage and strength in their endeavors.
She was named London s hottest barrister by hit legal blog Your Barrister Boyfriend which declared her to be both breathtakingly beautiful and formidably successful. As a source close to Clooney reportedly told People magazine this year Alamuddin is on his level if not a cut above.
That might be understating things a bit. With her experience in human rights and connections around the world the Clooney Alamuddin pair could be especially formidable. Clooney who is respected as much for his political savvy as for his Hollywood superstardom has been active in humanitarian campaigns abroad most notably in Darfur and South Sudan and wrote about the plight of newly independent South Sudan for The Daily Beast. He also launched a monitoring program directed at the border of northern and southern Sudan to keep an eye on Omar al Bashir the Sudanese dictator charged with war crimes by the International Criminal Court (ICC). The program Satellite Sentinel Project is designed to document and deter atrocities against civilians.
Alamuddin has been at the center of some controversies in her career too. In addition to defending Assange she also defended Abdullah al Senussi Muammar Gaddafi s spy chief of four decades before the International Criminal Court. While she was criticized for defending a man charged with crimes against humanity she seemed to be defending the reputation of the ICC as well as upholding the principle that everyone deserves a defense attorney.
A scary precedent has been set she told the Observer back in May. The ICC made its decision despite the fact that Libya did not allow us a single visit to Senussi.
The whole point of the ICC is to be there when national systems can't do the job she added. Instead it is giving a flawed dangerous process the stamp of approval.
Alamuddin is such a well respected lawyer that shortly after the couple announced their engagement Josephine Tovey wrote in The Age that it should be Clooney who should be thanking his lucky stars having snagged one of Britain's most eligible bachelorettes.
If our world was one that valued achievements in education politics and human rights as much as it did celebrity headlines around the world would have this week screamed Sorry boys Amal is taken she wrote.
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