Amal Clooney, the leading human rights barrister, was threatened with arrest by Egypian officials after she identified flaws in the country’s justice system that led to the jailing of three Al Jazeera journalists, it has emerged. British-Lebanese lawyer Mrs Clooney, who married American actor George Clooney at a lavish ceremony in Venice last September, represents Mohamed Fahmy, one the three journalists convicted of terrorism in December 2013.
On Thursday, an Egyptian court ordered the retrial of the three journalists, acknowledging major problems with their initial conviction. The sentences handed to Mr Fahmy, Al Jazeera’s Egyptian-Canadian bureau chief, as well as Australian former BBC journalist Peter Greste and Egyptian freelance producer Baher Mohamed, had provoked international outrage. In an interview, Mrs Clooney said a report she had co-authored on the independence of Egypt’s judiciary – a politically sensitive subject in the north African country – was deemed so controversial that she was warned she could be arrested if she visited Cairo. "When I went to launch the report, first of all they stopped us from doing it in Cairo," Mrs Clooney said. "They said: ‘Does the report criticise the army, the judiciary, or the government?’ We said: ‘Well, yes.’ They said: ‘Well then, you’re risking arrest.’" In Egypt, insulting the judiciary is an imprisonable offence.
