Amal Clooney releases video message to highlight jailed Maldives leader's plight

George Clooney's high-powered attorney wife has stepped up her campaign to defend former Maldivian President Mohamed Nasheed by releasing a new Amnesty International video.

Amal Clooney is urging people around the world to take action in a bid to free Nasheed, who she's convinced has been wrongly imprisoned in his homeland.

"I read the judgment and all the paperwork and it became clear very quickly that we were dealing with a show trial, sham proceedings really," she says in the video which was released this week by Amnesty International officials. "It was clearly a politicised way to get him out of the scene and not able to run in the presidential elections in 2018."

Clooney has also added her name to a letter published on The Huffington Post website.

She spent time in the Maldives this past summer (15) hoping to highlight the plight of Nasheed, the first democratically elected leader of the Maldives.

"The more I read about him, I found him to be an inspirational figure," she explains. "He was trying to bring human rights and democracy to the Maldives.

"He's also someone who became known as the Mandela of the Maldives because he's a human rights activist, and before he was president he was a journalist and an opposition figure and he paid a price for that. He was arrested more than 20 times in his country, he was tortured in prison and subjected to solitary confinement."

Amal's worried husband recently confessed he was glad his wife had been granted safe passage out of the Maldives during an appearance on The Late Show with Stephen Colbert last month (Sep15), after learning that one of her colleagues had been stabbed.

He said, "It's a tricky place to be right now. Her co-counsel was just stabbed in the head a few days ago... I'm very concerned with her being there, quite honestly."