Amal and George Clooney are notoriously private about their marriage. The 39-year-old human rights lawyer and her actor husband, who have been married for two years and are expecting twins in June, rarely speak about their relationship to the media.
However, Amal has revealed she welcomes the spotlight on her marriage to the 55-year-old film star when it helps to raise awareness about her legal battle to prosecute militant group ISIS for genocide.
“There’s lots of my work that takes place behind closed doors that is not ever seen,” she told the BBC. “I think if there are more people who now understand what’s happening about the Yazidis and ISIS, and if there can be some action that results from that that can help those clients, then I think it’s a really good thing to give that case the extra publicity that it may get.”
She added that it’s only worth shining the spotlight on good messages. “If you don’t have a good case and don’t have a good message then shining a light on it is not going to get you very far,” she said in the interview.
Amal’s own message is indeed a good one: she is a lawyer for Nadia Murad Basee Taha, a Yazidi woman, Nobel Peace Prize nominee and sex trafficking victim who was captured by ISIS in 2014. Nadia is just one of the young girls Amal has spoken to who had been ‘raped and enslaved by ISIS.’
“It’s been the most harrowing testimony I’ve ever heard,” she said of the victim’s stories. “We know that it’s genocide. The UN has said so. In other words: ISIS is trying to destroy them [the Yazidi’s] as a group and we are allowing it to happen without actually calling ISIS to account.”
According to the NY Post, Amal is scheduled to speak to the United Nations this week to urge the organisation to collect evidence against ISIS, such as documents and DNA, to bring them to court for genocide against the Yazidi minority group in Iraq. And if her famous last name helps to draw attention to that cause, it will be “a really good thing.”
