Amal Clooney has been a ballbusting barrister for a while now. I guess. I mean, some of her reputation came “after the fact,” when George Clooney’s publicity machine got a hold of Amal and tried to make her sound like the most beautiful legal genius-unicorn that ever existed. But in the real world, Amal has done some interesting things in her career. Back in February 2014, Amal wrote a report on the corruption within the Egyptian court system, how well-connected Egyptian officials can pretty much pick and choose how they want certain cases prosecuted, or which judge to hear which case, etc, as opposed to Egypt’s judiciary having some semblance of independence. Amal spoke to The Guardian about this ten-month old report and how the report seems prescient in dealing with a legal case currently making its way through Egypt’s court system: the arrest and detention of three al-Jazeera journalists.

Egyptian officials warned human rights barrister Amal Clooney that she risked arrest after identifying the same serious flaws in its judicial system that subsequently contributed to the conviction of three al-Jazeera journalists now jailed in Cairo. In an interview with the Guardian after their appeal hearing this week, Clooney, a lawyer for one of the trio, said they were victims of the same flaws that she earmarked in a February 2014 report about Egyptian courts.

Written before Clooney became involved in the al-Jazeera case, officials deemed the report so controversial that they threatened her team with arrest should they have tried to present its findings inside Egypt.

“When I went to launch the report, first of all they stopped us from doing it in Cairo,” Clooney told the Guardian. “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.’”

The report, compiled on behalf of the International Bar Association, said Egypt’s judicial system was not as independent as it could be. It pointed out that officials in the ministry of justice have wide powers over nominally independent judges, and highlighted the control the government can exert over state prosecutors.

Among other recommendations, Clooney and her co-authors suggested ending the practice that allows Egyptian officials to handpick judges for certain politicised cases. “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,” Clooney. said “And this one was no different.”

The three journalists – Peter Greste, Baher Mohamed, and Mohamed Fahmy, whom Clooney represents – were initially sentenced to between seven and 10 years in jail last June by the controversial Egyptian judge Mohamed Nagy Shehata. Shehata became notorious during the trial for rarely taking off his aviator sunglasses, mocking Fahmy’s fiancee, and for cracking a joke about World Press Freedom day. A few months later, he also sentenced to death 188 people, Clooney said, “in one mass trial which didn’t distinguish between each defendant’s criminal responsibility”. Shehata failed to respond to several requests for interview.

At the trio’s appeal on New Year’s Day, a new judge refused to throw out the case, but agreed to a retrial, after recognising problems with the initial process. But Clooney fears those flaws – which included the presentation of a Gotye song, footage of a trotting horse, and pictures of Greste’s parents as evidence of the trio’s guilt – are so serious that they will compromise the integrity of any second hearing.

“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 said. She has waived most of her usual fees, and is paid directly by Fahmy without the support of al-Jazeera. “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.” As a result, Clooney has concluded “that we have to continue and double our efforts to achieve his release in other ways. Unfortunately we have to conclude that we can’t rely on these Egyptian court processes to achieve a fair or swift result.”

[From The Guardian]

In the same article, Amal also discusses the possibility that Egypt might simply deport the three al-Jazeera journalists as a way of “punishing” them. Her client, Fahmy, is Canadian and there is every hope that she’ll be able to make that quick deportation happen. I also wonder why al-Jazeera isn’t paying for the legal fees of their journalists? Why not? And why is Amal making Fahmy pay at all, even if she has waived most of her regular fees?

Photos courtesy of WENN, Fame/Flynet.