Amal Clooney Talks Being Threatened With Arrest In Egypt as She Represents Journalist Jailed in Cairo

Human rights attorney opens up to The Guardian about rattling the Middle Eastern nation's government with a report she co-wrote criticizing the judiciary

George Clooney has scored himself one badass of a missus.

Amal Clooney—a globally recognized attorney specializing in international human rights long before she was the "Most Fascinating Person of 2014"—was warned not too long ago to watch her step in Egypt after she co-wrote a report on behalf of the International Bar Association in February 2014 that criticized aspects of the Middle Eastern nation's judiciary system.

Her firm has since gone to bat for an Al Jazeera journalist who is currently behind bars in Cairo along with two colleagues, and Clooney told The Guardian after her client's appeal hearing Thursday that he is a victim of the flaws she highlighted in her report.

And she understands first-hand how precarious a move it is for anyone to speak out against the country's authority figures.

"When I went to launch the report, first of all they stopped us from doing it in Cairo," she told the paper. "They said: ‘Does the report criticize the army, the judiciary, or the government?' We said: ‘Well, yes.' They said: ‘Well then, you're risking arrest.'"

Referring to a recommendation in the report that officials not be allowed to hand-select judges for certain high-profile cases, Clooney added, "That recommendation wasn't followed, and we've seen the results of that in this particular case where you had a handpicked panel led by a judge who is known for dispensing brutal verdicts. And this one was no different."

The judge who presided over the appeal didn't overturn the conviction of Clooney's client, Mohamed Fahmy, or the two other journalists, but he did grant them a new trial. (Fahmy has attorneys representing him locally in Egypt, while Clooney is advising from abroad on matters related to international law and leading efforts to secure his deportation out of Egypt.)

The trio were sentenced in June to seven to 10 years in jail by a different jurist, Mohamed Nagy Shehata, who just made global headlines in December by sentencing 188 people to death in connection with a fatal attack on a police station in August 2013.

"If the idea is: well, there were errors and now there's going to be a retrial, but then the retrial operates on the same basis as the original one, that doesn't really mean much," Clooney also told The Guardian. "I don't see how the prosecution can proceed again in a trial process even if the judges were to be constituted properly this time around. I don't see how they could fix the lack of evidence."

Ultimately, "we have to continue and double our efforts to achieve his release in other ways," she said of Fahmy. "Unfortunately we have to conclude that we can't rely on these Egyptian court processes to achieve a fair or swift result."