How Human Rights Lawyer Amal Clooney Uses Her Platform for Change

CL25’s celebrity closing Main Stage speaker Amal Clooney will share how events can serve as channel to combat social injustice.

Author: Casey Gale       

dark-haired woman in red top in front of lilac background

Amal Clooney will complete the Main Stage schedule at CL25 in the session “Leveraging Your Platform to Combat Social Injustice.”

Amal Alamuddin, born in 1978 in Beirut, fled the Lebanese civil war with her family as a toddler, resettling near London. Today the world knows her as Amal Clooney — she achieved Hollywood stardom when she married actor George Clooney in 2014. By then, however, the international law and human rights barrister — a British attorney authorized to participate in advocacy in the higher courts — had long been a superstar in her own right, recognized in the legal community for her work in high-profile cases regarding mass atrocities, including representing victims of genocide in Sudan and Armenia.

Clooney has worked as Counsel to the UN Inquiry on the use of armed drones; served as deputy chair of an International Bar Association Panel of Legal Experts on Media Freedom; and sat on the U.K. Attorney General’s panel of experts on public international law. In a landmark case, Clooney represented more than 400 Yazidis, a Kurdish religious group, in the world’s only trials in which ISIS members have been convicted of genocide against them. These accomplishments are among many others on her resume that made her the Gwen Ifill Award recipient from the Committee to Protect Journalists in 2020 and Legal 500’s International Law Junior of the Year in 2024.

“She is described as ‘a brilliant legal mind’ who is ‘in a league of her own at the Bar,’” according to law firm Doughty Street Chambers, where Clooney works. “The [legal] directories spotlight her ‘commanding presence before courts’ and describe her as ‘a dream performer before international tribunals’ with ‘superb advocacy’ that is ‘crystal clear in focus and highly persuasive.’ The rankings emphasize her ability to galvanize ‘heads of state, foreign ministers and business … in a way that is very effective’ for victims of human rights abuses.”

In 2022, TIME recognized Clooney — who additionally serves as an adjunct professor at Columbia Law School — in its “Women of the Year” issue, in which she gave a rare peek into the cases she chooses to tackle.

“I’m responding to what I see happening in the world,” she told TIME. “A world where the guilty are free, and the innocent are imprisoned — where the human-rights abusers are free, and those who report on the abuses are locked up. As a lawyer, I can do something about that. Or I can at least try. So my work is focused on trying to help liberate victims and prosecute perpetrators — and by extension, our foundation’s work is trying to really do that at scale and globally,” she said, referencing her work on The Clooney Foundation for Justice, an organization she founded with her husband to provide free legal support to victims of abuses of power. Their programs help “wage justice,” she said, against the most vulnerable, including women, marginalized communities, and journalists.

“I’m guided by what I’m really outraged about and what I think I can actually try to influence,” Clooney told TIME. “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.”

Clooney will serve as the closing Main Stage speaker at CL25 in the session “Leveraging Your Platform to Combat Social Injustice,” during which she will discuss how individuals and organizations can be catalysts for positive change, something she has modeled throughout her own career. For the full program of events, visit ConveningLeaders.org.

Casey Gale is managing editor of Convene.

Amal Clooney is brought to CL25 by Greater Miami Convention & Visitors Bureau.

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