Lawyer Amal Alamuddin and the rebranding of the idea of "wife"
Heading "Heroine" is dedicated to for women who are equal and who have something to learn - in one way or another. One of such heroines of our days is lawyer Amal Alamuddin, the owner of a brilliant career and a woman with whom the most enviable groom of Hollywood was lucky. Since the moment he got engaged to Clooney, the name Amal has not left the pages of the glossy press, and Google is full of headlines like “Amal bought George two Cocker Spaniels,” and this is unlikely to ever stop. We tell what it is famous for in fact, and about its most important processes.
"The world-famous lawyer Amal Alamuddin married the actor," - this was the title that the world of the press met on September 28 of this year. “I could find someone better,” grumbled at Jezebel six months before the wedding, when it became known that Amal was dating George Clooney. It seems that in the world of post-feminism, everyone agreed that she was cooler than him, very loudly and constantly emphasizing the exceptional moments of her biography. But such headlines and desperate attempts to raise the media only confirmed the existing stereotypes: a woman is judged by what a man is next to her, and the name of Alamuddin before the famous engagement was known to more or less nobody. After all, Amal, in a white wedding hat with wide sides, with a wide happy smile, which only the bridegroom’s bride gives, really could have found better chroniclers.
In the world of advocacy international affairs are considered elite. International law is confusing, heterogeneous, messing with it for a long time, and big names are done faster than usual, because things are more resonant. Ordinary lawyers look at internationals for wolves: they are doing something like a little, and they do more exhaust. The attitude towards women in such an advocacy is also appropriate: they flit like butterflies and smile politely, while the rest of the world has a lot of legislative talmus and hates itself. Amal Alamuddin, who grew up in a family of Lebanese intellectuals, seemed to be the exception to the rule, but these rules were established in the Middle East. Amal's mother, Baria, was a journalist for the pan-Arab newspaper Al-Hayat, an analogue of the Russian Moskovsky Komsomolets with a daily circulation of 300,000 copies. My father taught business theory at American University of Beirut. A family with such an obvious liberal orientation followed the path of the majority of Lebanon’s intellectual families and in 1980 moved to the UK.
The main claim to her work is the loudness of cases for which she undertakes and in which the winner seems to be known in advance
Educated at Oxford and New York University, Alamuddin began her internship with Sonya Sotomayor, the first ever US Supreme Court judge of Latin American origin and only a third female judge. Immediately after graduation, Amal got a job at Sullivan and Cromwell, specializing in financial law. After the “Sullivan” career, Amal quickly went uphill: Alamuddin got a job at the UN International Court of Justice, where she began to work on the Special Tribunal for Lebanon and the International Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia. Global success, international recognition - and in the end the status of an international star of the legal profession. In general, the golden girl.
If you look objectively, the affairs that Amal and her colleagues chose were exceptionally resonant, and she simply did not take on the petty leftist. For example, the Lebanon Tribunal was involved in the case of the assassination of the country's Prime Minister Rafik Hariri. In short, the successes are as follows: several years after the murder, the tribunal named in the indictment the names of four Hezbollah activists, and two years later the fifth name was added to the accusation. Following the work done, the team of lawyers combined their experience in the book The Special Tribunal for Lebanon: Law and Practice. The name Amal was also on the cover.
Then Alamuddin turned her gaze to the case of Yulia Tymoshenko. In 2011, the former Prime Minister of Ukraine was sentenced to 7 years in prison in a case of abuse of power and official authority in concluding gas contracts with Russia in 2009. The trial, which received a lot of complaints, was accused of political motivation, and until 2013 the European Court of Human Rights adopted as many as 6 resolutions calling Tymoshenko’s conclusion “politically motivated”, and her release from custody became one of the conditions of the European Union to sign an association with Ukraine. Amal Alamuddin represented the interests of the ex-Prime Minister at the European Court of Human Rights and contested her detention. In a short BBC interview recorded after the release of Tymoshenko, Amal repeats what he had said in several previous years: not a single self-respecting lawyer saw Tymoshenko’s criminal intent, and her conclusion was only a political move by the then President of Ukraine. If the outcome of the investigation were different, if the lawyer were not Alamuddin, it is unknown. The main complaint about her work is the volume of the cases for which she undertakes and in which the winner seems to be known in advance.
Almost immediately after Amal took office in the Doughty Street chamber - one of the largest legal organizations in the world - the loudest investigation of the decade fell into the piggy bank of political affairs - the case of Julian Assange. The creator of WikiLeaks is being seriously hunted: although he has only been formally charged with a rape case, Assange has been put on the international wanted list and has been living in the Ecuadorian embassy for the second year, which granted him political asylum. Amal Alamuddin represents the interests of Assange in the process of his extradition to Sweden, which has lasted since 2010. The decision on the extradition of Assange was made by the High Court of London in 2011, since then numerous appeals have been filed to the court, each of which was rejected by the court, although until today Julian Assange has not been formally charged. In the case of Assange, Amal Alamuddin plays a key role - represents his interests in the process of reviewing an extradition request. Assange himself is pleased with the choice of his lawyer: he calls her "a friend and a lawyer who is not afraid to deal with a corrupt government and engage in politicized cases," and in August of this year, it seems that Amal received an unexpected solution to his problems - at least with an improvised Tribunes on the balcony of the embassy announced that it would soon leave the embassy of Ecuador. But what about the Middle East? Periodically, Amal turns his gaze on him, calling white white and black black, but never succeeding in resolving issues in a troubled region in which the law is not written to anyone, and Western education does not mean anything. For example, after the revolution in Egypt and shortly before the overthrow of the leader of the newly organized Islamist party Muslim Brothers, a delegation of the International Bar Association headed by Amal Alamuddin visited the country. The delegation expressed its dissatisfaction with the methods of work of Mursi, however, while the lawyers were preparing the final report, Mursi had already ceased to make decisions on the management of the country. In his article describing the “indicative trial” of Al Jazeera’s journalists, Amal Alamuddin describes the course of the trial, which was based on the lack of evidence, and at the same time appeals to justice, recalling that since 2011 the population of the country has been in troubled condition and hopes for the government who can protect their rights. Her client, Mohammed Fahmy, a journalist for Al Jazeera, is accused of aiding the Muslim Brothers, "slander" and all the deadly sins of this world.
Amal Alamuddin said that the only side that really “undermines the image of Egypt” is his government, which allows itself to stop up journalists with quite radical methods: the prisoners were not provided with translators, and the video of their transfer to the courthouse was played on the national TV under the soundtrack “Tor: Kingdom Darkness. " Following the results of the trial, Fahmy was sentenced to 7 years in prison, but Amal does not give up and hopes that the international publicity of this case and the appeals will do his job and innocent journalists (except Fahmy, two more Al Jazeera employees are in custody) will be released. It is obvious that the East does not consider it to be its own, it does not understand lofty speeches about freedom of speech, and Amal, brought up in the West, does not want to. And loses. Like most Western lawyers, Amal is involved in social work - she teaches international criminal law in a number of universities (including the University of London and the Academy of International Law in The Hague), and in 2014 she took part in a global summit designed to end sexual crimes in war zones. It was thanks to charitable and social initiatives of Amal that she met her future then, and now her real husband, George Clooney. Amal’s private life, like Amal’s own, was unknown to the international establishment before the famous engagement. Now she falls into the lists of London’s hottest lawyers, the press merges in a massive ecstasy about her style, and her mom supposedly considers Clooney to be not the best choice, according to a source of universal gossip Daily Mail, reflecting the subconscious desires of society.
The fact is that Amal is exactly the same star in her circle as Clooney is in her: she takes on blockbusters and political dramas, only in the field of international advocacy, and glitters on the covers, only next to celebrities under investigation. Retrospectively looking at her biography, where Assanji and Yulia Tymoshenko were completely, one inevitably regrets that in order to complete the image of the modern super-successful woman, a trophy husband from Hollywood is needed.
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