Special to the Journal
International Human Rights Lawyer Amal Clooney addressed over 900 attendees at the Salem State University Speaker Series at O’Keefe Complex Tuesday.
Foundation, Inc.’s speaker series. Award-winning journalist and Salem State alumna Anne Driscoll ’76 interviewed Clooney about her work as an international human rights attorney. This year marks the 40th anniversary of the Foundation’s popular speaker series.
Amal Clooney is an award-winning lawyer specializing in international law and human rights and visiting professor at Columbia Law School. Described as a “brilliant legal mind,” Clooney frequently represents victims of mass atrocities, including genocide and sexual violence. She has acted in many precedent-setting human rights cases in recent years, including the world’s first trial against an ISIS member for genocide and the first case alleging complicity in crimes against humanity by a company that funded the terror group. She has represented Armenia in a case involving the Armenian genocide and was recently counsel to 126 victims of the genocide in Darfur, Sudan, at the International Criminal Court. In 2021, she was appointed special adviser to the prosecutor of the International Criminal Court on Darfur. Clooney also represents political prisoners around the world and has helped to secure the freedom of journalists arbitrarily detained for their work across the globe. In 2020, Clooney was the recipient of the Gwen Ifill Award for ‘extraordinary and sustained achievement in the cause of press freedom’ from the Committee to Protect Journalists. Clooney is also a visiting professor at Columbia Law School, where she co-teaches the Human Rights course. Read Clooney’s full biography at salemstate.edu/series.
Moderator Anne Driscoll, a Salem State alumna, is an award-winning journalist (Boston Globe, New York Times, People Magazine)
and two-time Fulbright Scholar to Ireland who investigated wrongful convictions and lectured at the National University of Ireland, Galway, the Irish Innocence Project at Griffith College in Dublin and at the Justice Brandeis Law Project of the Schuster Institute for Investigative Journalism at Brandeis University in Massachusetts. Her investigative work helped exonerate Angel Echavarria, sentenced to life without parole, but released in 2015 after serving 21 years in prison for a murder he didn’t commit, and has also been cited by the legal team of Stephen Pina, who has been freed. Her work also contributed to Irish President Michael D. Higgins giving the first posthumous presidential pardon in Irish history for Harry Gleeson, who was wrongfully hanged to death in 1941 for the murder of his neighbor Moll McCarthy. She is also a licensed certified social worker in Massachusetts who has written a self-help guidebook series for girls called Girl to Girl. Read Driscoll’s biography at salemstate.edu/series.