“The arc of history doesn’t bend toward justice,” said Amal Clooney in a 2025 interview with British ’s features director Olivia Marks. “Individuals have to pull it that way.” The 48-year-old has built a career on that conviction. One of the most accomplished human rights barristers working today, she is also Professor of Practice in International Law at Oxford University and co-chair of the Clooney Foundation for Justice, which provides free legal aid in over 40 countries. Then there are The Albies, which she presides over with her husband George, honouring those who defend justice around the globe, often at great personal risk.

Now in their fifth year, the awards took place this evening at the Natural History Museum, where an audience including Anna Wintour, Brad Pitt, Charlotte Tilbury, Donatella Versace, Emma Thompson, Felicity Jones, Graham Norton, Laura Dern, Marisa Abela, Myha’la and Ncuti Gatwa gathered to celebrate this year’s honourees: Kyrgyz journalists Bolot Temirov and Makhabat Tazhibek Kyzy; Malawian girls’ rights advocate Vanessa Mwangala; American photojournalist Lynsey Addario; Congolese organisation Justice Plus; and Brad Smith, Microsoft’s vice chair and president and a human rights advocate. The assembled stars will doubtless dig deep: at last year’s event, Meryl Streep pledged $1 million to the cause.

Amal and George were centre stage, of course, she in a liquid-gold sequin gown by Gucci, the evening’s sponsor, and he in classic suiting. The glamour might seem at odds with the gravity of the occasion, but Clooney understands how to put the attention it attracts to good use. “If the good people – those who don’t agree with what is happening – stay quiet, it becomes very difficult to effect change,” she told Marks. “If there is more cowardice than courage in the corridors of power – in governments, companies – it is very difficult to improve the system. Yet I believe that justice must be waged, it is not something that simply happens on its own.”