Amal Clooney revealed on Monday that she had reviewed the International Criminal Court prosecutor’s investigation that led to the request for arrest warrants for three Hamas leaders and two Israeli leaders, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and Defense Minister Yoav Gallant.
Ms. Clooney, a prominent British lawyer, specializes in international law and human rights. She has appeared before the International Criminal Court and the International Court of Justice, where she has represented victims of mass atrocities.
She had received criticism on social media for not speaking up about the Israel-Hamas war. On Monday, she said in a statement that she was a member of an eight-person panel of legal and academic experts convened in January by the International Criminal Court at the request of its prosecutor, Karim Khan, to review his investigation into possible crimes committed in the conflict.
For this investigation, the panel was asked to determine if the prosecutor’s applications for arrest warrants met the International Criminal Court’s standard. Specifically, the group was asked whether there were “reasonable grounds to believe” that those named in the warrant applications had committed crimes within the court’s jurisdiction, including genocide, war crimes and crimes against humanity.
The panel unanimously concluded that there were such grounds, and published a report on Monday detailing their findings. Ms. Clooney said in a statement that the panel “engaged in an extensive process of evidence review and legal analysis,” before reaching its decision.
“The law that protects civilians in war was developed more than 100 years ago and it applies in every country in the world regardless of the reasons for a conflict,” Ms. Clooney said. “As a human rights lawyer, I will never accept that one child’s life has less value than another’s.”
Israel — like the United States — is not a signatory to the international treaty that created the court, and does not accept the court’s jurisdiction. But Ms. Clooney said, “I do not accept that any conflict should be beyond the reach of the law, nor that any perpetrator should be above the law.”
Ms. Clooney is a barrister at Doughty Street Chambers in London, a group of associated lawyers with a specialty in human rights, and is an adjunct professor at Columbia Law School in New York City. She also founded the Clooney Foundation for Justice with her husband, the actor George Clooney, a nonprofit that provides free legal support to victims of human rights abuses.
In September 2021, she was appointed by Mr. Khan to serve as a special adviser on the Sudanese region of Darfur, where a civil war has led to a humanitarian crisis that U.N. officials say is one of the worst in decades.
The panel convened to consider arrest warrants in the case of Israel and Hamas included Adrian B. Fulford, a former judge of the International Criminal Court and retired justice of the Court of Appeal of England and Wales; and Theodor Meron, a Holocaust survivor, former Israeli official, and former judge of the international tribunals on Rwanda and the former Yugoslavia.
In an op-ed published in The Financial Times, the members of the panel said that they “hope that this process will contribute to increased protections for civilians and sustainable peace in a region that has already endured too much.”
