International juristry meets Nespresso ads

70 February 2015

MAL Alamuddin-Clooney:

by night wife of heartthrob

espresso addict George

Clooney, by day eminent

barrister specialising in inter-

national law and human rights, is ﬁnding

that with the tinsel comes an edge. She

has experienced several descents from

the rareﬁed elevation of the international

bar, as not just her wardrobe but her pol-

itics and that of her debonair husband

– whose mother famously acknowledged

that he had found in her “an intellectual

equal” (for the ﬁrst time), are scrutinised,

and even ridiculed.

At the Oscars Tina Fey in sub-Ricky

Gervais mode declared as the camera

bore down on the perfect couple: “Amal

is a human rights lawyer who worked on

the Enron case, was an adviser to Koﬁ

Annan regarding Syria, and was selected

for a three-person commission investi-

gating rules of war violations in the Gaza

Strip”.

She went on: “So tonight, her husband

is getting a lifetime achievement award”.

Cue laughter and applause on the night.

Less edifying was a follow-up article

in the New York Post by Andrea Peyser,

a conservative columnist who once

described Christiane Amanpour as

“CNN’s war slut”, in a column headed,

‘George Clooney has a Problem – and it’s

Amal’.

After barbs about her “bovine-

insemination gloves”, Peyser got serious:

“Fey ’s asser tion that the woman who ma r-

ried George Clooney, 53, in September

had been selected to serve on a commis-

sion investigating war crimes in Gaza,

allegedly committed by Israeli forces,

caused me to gasp. Didn’t she refuse the

assignment?”.

Peyser determined to make life diﬃcult

for the delightful jurist: “Fey’s publicist

told me that the comedian was just mak-

ing a joke at George Clooney’s expense,

but would not say why Fey chose to go

there. A rep for Poehler did not respond

to my email, and George Clooney’s pub-

licist said he passed my questions on to

the missus, who did not get back to me.

Here is the story: the UN Human Rights

Council announced in August that the

then-Ms. Alamuddin, engaged to Clooney

at the time, would serve on a panel, one

that Israeli leaders have likened to a

‘witch hunt’ whose members are bent on

penalizing Israel for acting in self-defense

against Palestinian rocket attacks”.

Peyser noted that Alamuddin tellingly

declared she would skip serving on the

panel because she was too busy with eight

legal cases. But snorted that “she released

a statement that revealed her antipathy

toward the Jewish state: ‘I am horriﬁed by

the situation in the occupied Gaza Strip,

particularly the civilian casualties that

have been caused, and strongly believe

that there should be an independent

investigation and accountability for

crimes that have been committed’, it

read”.

Peyser concluded: “I believe that her

refusal to join the anti-Israel commission

was an eﬀort not to antagonize her then-

ﬁancé’s Hollywood colleagues, many of

whom are pro-Israel and/or Jewish”.

Alamuddin-Clooney’s roving brief to

get the Elgin marbles back from avari-

cious colonialists in the British Museum

for Greece has also attracted derision.

Writing in the Daily Telegraph last year

under the headline ‘Amal Clooney should

back oﬀ. Lord Elgin was a hero who saved

the marbles for the world’, Dominic

Selwood linked Clooney’s “kooky PR

stunt” to his love interest and was unim-

pressed. Clooney had claimed “they came

from the Pantheon in Rome rather than

the Parthenon in Athens (and also that

they had been taken by Lord ‘Eljin’)”.

Never before has anyone laughed at

George Clooney, except Brad Pitt, and

maybe the couple in the Nespresso ad –

and that was just joshing.

Alamuddin-Clooney – who has rep-

resented clients at the International

Criminal Court (ICC) and has had cli-

ents including Julian Assange and

former prime minister of Ukraine, Yulia

Tymoshenko, recently endured another

controversy over an interview she gave

the Guardian about her client, jailed

Al-Jazeera journalist Mohamad Fahmy.

International juristry

meets Nespresso ads

Are Clooney and wife losing touch? By Ken Phelan

Peyser claimed

Alamuddin-

Clooney

“revealed

her antipathy

toward the

Jewish State”

“

INTERNATIONAL CLOONEYS

February 2015 71

During the course of this inter view, and

following an appeal hearing in January

at which the three journalists were told

they faced a retrial, Alamuddin-Clooney

spoke of a report she had submitted in

February 2014 to the Egyptian govern-

ment on behalf of the International Bar

Association’s Human Rights Institute

(IBA). It detailed a litany of abuses and

inadequacies of the Egyptian judicial sys-

tem which she believed contributed to the

imprisonment of her client and the two

other al-Jazeera journalists.

Fahmy, a Canadian national and fellow

Al-Jazeera journalists Baher Mohamed

and Peter Greste have been imprisoned

since December 2013 on charges of abet-

ting terrorists, spreading false news and

endangering national security. They were

also charged with involvement with

the recently organisation the Muslim

Brotherhood, now proscribed as terror-

ist. The three were initially sentenced to

between seven and ten years in prison

last June by controversial Egyptian

judge Mohamed Nagy Shehata who sub-

sequently notoriously sentenced 188

people to death in one mass trial.

The IBA report chronicled the fail-

ings of the Egyptian courts under the

three regimes following the over-

throw of President Hosni Mubarak in

February 2011, and claimed that the

judiciary was not quite as independent

as it should be. The report also detailed

how the judiciary had been used for “arbi-

trary political ends”, had jailed people on

“vague charges of conspiracy” and for

“insulting the military”, “insulting the

president”, or “insulting Islam”.

Speaking of the continuing practice of

Egyptian oﬃcials hand-picking judges,

Alamuddin-Clooney said: “That recom-

mendation wasn’t followed, and we’ve

seen the results of that in this particular

case where you had a hand-picked panel

led by a judge who is known for dispens-

ing brutal verdicts”.

The current government, under

General-turned-President Abdel Fattah

al Sisi, failed to act on any of the 2014

report’s recommendations; under Sisi’s

rule, persecution of the ‘politically sus-

pect’ has in fact dramatically increased.

Speaking to the Guardian on January

1, Alamuddin-Clooney said she was una-

ble to publish the report in Cairo last year

as: “ﬁrst of all they stopped us from doing

it in Cairo. They said: ‘Does the report

criticise the army, the judiciary, or the

government?’ We said: ‘Well, yes.’ They

72 February 2015

said: ‘Well then, you’re risking arrest’”.

Following this interview, a story head-

lined: ‘Egypt warns Amal Clooney she

risks arrest over al-Jazeera three’ was

published on January 2 on the Guardian’s

website. In the story, the Guardian

claimed that Alamuddin- Clooney had

risked arrest by Egyptian “authori-

ties”, and also inferred that this threat

was both recent, and in relation to her

defence of Fahmy. The ﬁrst sentence of

the article stated: “Egyptian oﬃcials

have warned human rights barrister

Amal Clooney that she risks arrest after

identifying serious ﬂaws in its judicial

system that contributed to the convic-

tion of three al-Jazeera journalists now

jailed in Cairo”.

What followed was a string of inter-

national press stories claiming the

Egyptian government had threatened

Alamuddin-Clooney with arrest, with a

connection made between this threat and

her defence of Fahmy.

An indignant statement from Egypt’s

Ministry of Foreign Aﬀairs stated cat-

egorically that Alamuddin-Clooney had

not been under threat of arrest at any

stage, and advised foreign correspond-

ents to practice “diligence” and caution

in any future reporting in the country.

“We have nothing against her”, Interior

Ministry spokesman, Hani Abdel Latif,

said. “She should say exactly who said

that. Why not specify from the start

who told her that?”. Unedifying criti-

cism indeed.

The statement from the Egyptian

Foreign Ministry noted scathingly, “The

most basic professional rules require

veriﬁcation of the accuracy of the news

before it is published and drawn from

oﬃcial sources, as well as the need to

disseminate any formal correction or

comment in the same place and space”.

Alamuddin-Clooney, in a Hollywood-

scale climbdown, responded with

colleague Mark Wassouf via an article

for the Huﬃngton Post in which it was

claimed she had been misrepresented by

the Guardian.

The threat did not come from

“Egyptian oﬃcials” or “Egyptian author-

ities” as claimed by the Guardian, but

instead from so-called “experts in

Egyptian aﬀairs”. It was also noted that

the incident in question had occurred

in February 2014 – before Alamuddin-

Clooney represented Mr. Fahmy – and

had nothing to do with the case of the

Al-Jazeera journalists.

“As a result of warnings, the IBA

decided that it was not safe to hold the

launch in Cairo, and the authors were

forced to hold it in London instead.

This incident arose before Alamuddin-.

Clooney’s involvement in the Fahmy case,

before the current president was in oﬃce

and indeed in a context entirely unre-

lated to the case”.

When the Guardian contacted

Alamuddin-Clooney on January 5 to

clarify, she replied that the language she

had used in interview had been reviewed

by a colleague in the International Bar

Association’s Human Rights Institute,

who agreed with the term “experts

in Egyptian aﬀairs” in relation to the

threat.

Damningly, according to the

Guardian’s Patrick Kingsley, Alamuddin-

Clooney “checked and conﬁrmed the

quotation before publication” of the

original article. Nevertheless, on the

Guardian’s website on January 6 Chris

Elliott wrote: “The Guardian collectively

made a number of errors by conﬂating

two key aspects of the story, including a

signiﬁcantly misleading headline, and I

apologise on behalf of the newspaper to

Amal Clooney for those errors”.

Speaking of their defence of Fahmy,

Alamuddin-Clooney and Wassouf said

that they were “pursuing discussions

with the Egyptian and Canadian authori-

ties in a spirit of cooperation in order to

identify a swift and fair resolution to

the case”, and have submitted a pardon

request to the Egyptian authorities.

After her damning critique of the

Egyptian judicial system Alamuddin-

Clooney is not in favour with the Egyptian

government. This latest incident will only

serve to worsen the relationship, and may

even prejudice her client’s retrial.

Hollywood’s golden couple with their

unusually expansive outlooks need

to ensure the application of forensic

standards demanded by her career is

not subverted, risking dissipation of

the stardust or even of their (separate?)

Presidential ambitions, by the over-

whelming glamour and over-excitement

of new love. •

Hollywood’s

golden couple

need to ensure

the application

of forensic

standards

demanded by

her career is

not subverted

by the

overwhelming

glamour

and over-

excitement of

new love

“

Elgin Marbles

February 2015 73