Egypt says Amal Clooney was never threatened with arrest

Egypt has disputed a claim by British human rights lawyer Amal Clooney that she had been warned she risked arrest last year if she released a report in Cairo critical of the judiciary. Clooney, a rights lawyer who married Hollywood star George Clooney last year, told Britain’s Guardian newspaper that the warning had stopped her from going ahead with a Cairo launch for the February 2014 report for the International Bar Association. Egypt’s interior ministry spokesman Hani Abdel Latif questioned the source of the alleged warning.

She should say exactly who said that. Why not specify from the start who told her that? We have nothing against her.

Interior ministry spokesman Hani Abdel Latif

In the comments published by the Guardian on Saturday, Clooney did not detail the source of the alleged warning. The report, based on a fact-finding mission made in mid-2013, warned about the wide powers that ministers had over judges and highlighted a record of selective prosecutions, flaws that Clooney said later contributed to the convictions of three Al-Jazeera journalists. Clooney, who is now on the defence team for one of the three – Egyptian-Canadian Mohamed Fahmy – said the same flaws in the judicial system meant she had little confidence in the retrial ordered on Thursday by Egypt’s top court.

FreeAJStaff Entertainment