Amal Clooney, born Amal Alamuddin on 3 February 1978, is an international human rights lawyer from Lebanon and Britain. She has worked with many well-known clients, such as Mohamed Nasheed, Julian Assange, Yulia Tymoshenko, Nadia Murad, Maria Ressa, Khadija Ismayilova, and Mohamed Fahmy.
Clooney teaches International Law at the Blavatnik School of Government at Oxford and is a senior fellow at the Oxford Institute of Technology and Justice, which she helped start to use AI for improving access to justice.
Profile Summary
| Category | Details |
|---|---|
| Full Name | Amal Clooney |
| Birth Name | Amal Alamuddin |
| Date of Birth | 3 February 1978 (age 48) |
| Place of Birth | Beirut, Lebanon |
| Citizenship | United Kingdom; Lebanon; France |
| Alma Mater | University of Oxford (BA); New York University (LLM) |
| Occupation | Barrister |
| Years Active | 2000–present |
| Spouse | George Clooney (m. 2014) |
| Children | 2 |
Amal Clooney Age
Amal Alamuddin was born on 3 February 1978 in Beirut, Lebanon. She is 48 years old.
Biography & Early Life
Amal Alamuddin was born in Beirut, Lebanon, on 3 February 1978. Her father is Lebanese Druze and her mother is Lebanese Sunni Muslim from Tripoli. When Amal was two, her family moved to the United Kingdom to escape the Lebanese Civil War and settled in Gerrards Cross, Buckinghamshire. She has three siblings: a sister named Tala Alamuddin and two half-brothers from her father’s first marriage.
Clooney went to Dr Challoner’s High School in Little Chalfont, Buckinghamshire. She later studied at St Hugh’s College, Oxford, where she received an exhibition grant and the Shrigley Award. She graduated in 2000 with an upper second-class degree in Jurisprudence and is now an honorary fellow of St Hugh’s.
Amal studied for an LLM degree at New York University School of Law. Clooney received the Jack J. Katz Memorial Award for excellence in entertainment law. During her time at NYU, she worked for one semester in the office of Sonia Sotomayor, who was then a judge for the United States Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit and a faculty member at NYU Law.
Personal life
Clooney holds citizenship in the UK, Lebanon, and France. She speaks English and French fluently and can converse in Arabic.
On 28 April 2014, Clooney became engaged to American actor George Clooney, whom she met through a mutual friend in July 2013. They obtained marriage licences in London on 7 August 2014. The couple married on 27 September 2014 at Ca’ Farsetti in Venice, with the ceremony led by Clooney’s friend Walter Veltroni, an Italian politician. In October 2014, the Clooneys bought the Mill House on an island in the River Thames at Sonning Eye for about £10 million.
In February 2017, the American talk show The Talk reported that Clooney was pregnant. Matt Damon, a family friend, confirmed the news on Entertainment Tonight. In June 2017, Clooney gave birth to fraternal twins, a girl and a boy.
Philanthropy
Clooney worked with the Aurora Humanitarian Initiative to start the Amal Clooney Scholarship. This scholarship sends one female student from Lebanon each year to United World College Dilijan for a two-year International Baccalaureate program.
Clooney and her husband sponsored Hazim Avdal, a Yazidi student she met through her work with Nadia Murad. Avdal was studying at the University of Chicago.
In 2017, the Clooneys gave a $1 million grant to the Southern Poverty Law Center in Charlottesville, Virginia, to help fight hate groups in America.
After the Stoneman Douglas High School shooting in 2018, the Clooneys pledged $500,000 to March for Our Lives and planned to attend the event. They also donated $100,000 to the Young Center for Immigrant Children’s Rights, through their foundation, to support migrant children separated from their families at the Mexico–United States border.
Amal and George Clooney donated $100,000 to three Lebanese charities: the Lebanese Red Cross, Impact Lebanon, and Baytna Baytak. These organizations helped people affected by the 2020 explosion in Beirut.
In 2020, the Clooneys donated $1 million to support coronavirus relief. Their donations helped the NHS assist frontline workers and supported The Lebanese Food Bank, which aids single mothers, the elderly, and vulnerable people unable to work during the pandemic. They also gave to The Mill at Sonning Theatre near their Berkshire home to help it survive the pandemic.
In 2022, Clooney joined Michelle Obama and Melinda French Gates to launch the ‘Get Her There’ campaign, which aims to support education and empowerment for teenage girls.
Appointments
- Senior fellow, Oxford Institute of Technology and Justice.
- Appointed to the UK Attorney General’s Office Public International Law Panel (Panel C from 2014 to 2019 and Panel B from 2020 and Panel A from 2026), a panel of experts on international law which is called upon to advise and represent the UK in domestic and international courts.
- Honorary fellow of St Hugh’s College, Oxford.
- Appointed to the United Kingdom’s Team of Experts on preventing sexual violence in conflict zones (PSVI).
- Appointed as UK special envoy on media freedom (2019–2020) by the UK foreign secretary (2019–2020).
- Appointed as deputy chair of the High Level Panel of Legal Experts on Media Freedom (2019–2021) by Lord Neuberger, former president of the UK Supreme Court.
- Appointed as special adviser to the International Criminal Court prosecutor, Karim Khan KC.
- In 2013 she was appointed to a number of United Nations commissions, including as adviser to special envoy Kofi Annan on Syria and as counsel to the 2013 Drone Inquiry by UN human rights rapporteur Ben Emmerson KC into the use of drones in counter-terrorism operations.
- Appointed to the Human Dignity Trust Bar Panel, a small panel of barristers who act pro bono and provide advice on cases challenging discrimination against the LGBT community.
Clooney Foundation for Justice
In 2016, Clooney and her husband George Clooney started the Clooney Foundation for Justice (CFJ). The foundation offers free legal aid to defend free speech and women’s rights in more than 40 countries. CFJ runs two main programs: TrialWatch, which helps journalists who are unfairly imprisoned, and Waging Justice for Women, which supports women and girls in defending their rights against discrimination, child marriage, and violence.
The foundation’s efforts have freed dozens of journalists and helped thousands of women get legal support to protect their rights, including freedom from abuse, economic discrimination, and child marriage. In 2022, CFJ partnered with the Obama Foundation’s Girls Opportunity Alliance and Melinda French Gates to promote gender equality and reduce child marriage worldwide. The foundation also offers a fellowship program for young women lawyers in Africa to start careers in human rights.
Professor of Clinical Law Margaret Satterthwaite, who was the UN special rapporteur on the independence of judges and lawyers, said in 2024, that the CFJ is doing “crucial work…to make sure brave justice advocates can continue to advance human rights despite threats, criminalization, and harassment.”
In 2026, Clooney shared how her foundation uses AI to help close the gap between the number of lawyers and the need for justice in Malawi. She noted that 10% of girls under fifteen are forced into marriage, but only 800 lawyers serve a population of 22 million. The Clooney Foundation for Justice, together with the Women Lawyers Association and Oxford’s Blavatnik School of Government, is developing an AI chatbot to help people find nearby lawyers and draft legal remedies like protection orders. The chatbot can also help survivors create proper protection order requests.
