Chapter 1: What led Francesca Albanese to become a UN Special Rapporteur?
This is The Guardian. Today, the cost of speaking out, the human rights lawyer sanctioned by the US.
The Guardian
My life was calm. I wouldn't say ordinary because I don't know what ordinary is. But I was, I mean, I was with my family. I had started lecturing in various... This is Francesca Albanese.
You might have heard of her. You've probably seen her. She's the Italian lawyer who, in May 2022, became UN Special Rapporteur for the Occupied Palestinian Territories.
When I started this position, I was full of good intentions, which I still have, but I was so naive. I really thought that member states didn't know enough, didn't understand enough, or were animated by good intentions.
It is an unpaid job and it's never been an easy one. 18 months into the role came October the 7th and Israel's war on Gaza.
And then my life has been completely turned upside down ever since.
Francesca's work is to monitor and compile evidence on human rights abuses. She is called to be an independent expert to the United Nations and writes exhaustive reports using international law to assess what's happening in occupied Palestine. It's not work you expect would make her go viral on social media. or to see it become sanctioned by the Trump administration.
The U.S.
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Chapter 2: How have US sanctions impacted Francesca Albanese's life?
Secretary of State Marco Rubio posted on X saying, I am posing sanctions on UN Human Rights Council Special Rapporteur Francesca Albanese for her illegitimate and shameful efforts to prompt international criminal court action against U.S. and Israeli officials, companies and executives.
For many, Albanese is a hero for calling out a genocide in Gaza. But she's divisive. She's been accused of anti-Semitism. And she's had all sorts of abuse thrown at her, even at the United Nations itself.
Miss Albanese, you are a witch. And this report is another page in your spellbook. You have tried to curse Israel with lies and hatred. but your poison has failed.
To be vilified, mistreated, for standing side by side with those who are invisibilized and silenced, it's awful. I am no one. I'm just a Ligan expert who has studied and lived in Palestine and has written boring academic research about Palestinian forced displacement. And then, during my mandate, awful crimes start to happen. What shall I do? I just tell what I see, the way I see it.
From The Guardian, I'm Nosheen Iqbal. Today in Focus, Francesca Albanese in her own words. Francesca Albanese, welcome to Today in Focus. Now, you are an international lawyer specialising in human rights in the Middle East. And since 2022, you've been the UN's special rapporteur on the occupied Palestinian territories. Last July, in an extraordinary move, the US government sanctioned you.
It's a fate that you shared with Vladimir Putin, Bashar al-Assad and the late Ayatollah Khamenei. What impact did that have on your life?
Yeah, the impact is severe. The impact is severe. It equates to a civil death. I cannot perform transaction. I cannot make payments. I cannot receive payments through financial transactions. So I cannot have a bank account. But this is not just in the U.S. This is everywhere because the banking system of the US reaches everywhere, including in the part of the world I come from.
I've not been able to open a bank account in Italy or in any other European countries where I've tried.
So you can't use a credit card or a debit card?
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Chapter 3: What does Francesca Albanese say about the situation in Gaza?
And she's American educated. She's 13 and she's been going to throughout the US education system. And she's always said that she wants to go to study in the US. So this has not impacted me only. It has impacted my family and not just because of the freezing of my assets and because I'm no longer economically independent. I have the same degree of independence that I had when I was a young child.
Someone needs to take care of me, which is absolutely embarrassing and humiliating.
So even going to the supermarket, something as trivial as that, you're always having to carry cash.
No, I need to borrow money. I need to borrow money. I cannot access my earnings. They're blocked in so many places. The US sanctions operate in this way. Their aim is to create a chilling effect around the sanctioned person that you understand. It makes total sense if the person is a narcotrafficking or a threat to the US.
And so you say, OK, I need to protect my citizens from someone who really represents evil to my people. So all those who support or have relations with the sanctioned person transferring goods or services, they can be punished up to 20 years in jail or $1 million fine.
And so this includes your own employment as a professor as well, right? So this includes you teaching in the US, which you did. You can do that no longer. Yeah. Yeah.
No, I've lost all my affiliations with the U.S. partnerships, with U.S. organizations, with U.S. universities. I've seen people running away from me because, of course, the chilling effect is powerful. Those working on Palestine are vulnerable to this, to the capriciousness of this government, of this administration.
The US government has said it sanctioned Francesca Albanese for cooperating with the ICC, the International Criminal Court, which is pursuing prosecution of Israeli nationals for war crimes. It also accused Albanese of being unfit for service as a UN special rapporteur.
In February, Francesca's husband and daughter filed a lawsuit against the Trump administration, arguing that she was being punished for speaking out about Israel's abuses against Palestinians. Two weeks ago, a federal judge in Washington, D.C. backed their claim. Albanese, he wrote, in quite a scathing legal opinion, has done nothing but speak. He ruled the sanctions should, for now, be lifted.
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Chapter 4: What legal basis does Francesca use to describe actions in Gaza as genocide?
And you knew making that argument was going to be huge, risky even. What was the legal basis for your argument at that point?
Mm-hmm.
My main legal basis was the Genocide Convention. The Genocide Convention is one of the most adamant and clear legal instruments ever produced by the international community. And it says that the intention to destroy a national, ethnic, religious or racial group as such is considered genocidal and it can happen through various acts.
Acts of killing members of the group or inflicting severe bodily or mental harm to members of the group, creating the conditions of life calculated to destroy the group as such, the prevention of birth, of this attraction of children. The thing is that these acts are crimes in and of themselves.
However, they constitute genocide when they are committed with intent to destroy the group, with the intent to destroy physically and biologically the group as such. This is what I used. I, of course, read the main jurisprudence existing in the Rwanda Tribunal, former Yugoslavia Tribunal, the International Court of Justice.
I studied what the main experts have said, and I had no doubt whatsoever that we could already speak of genocide in March 2024. Israel was killing without respite, without distinctions, without respect for proportionality and precautions, which are the basic tenets of international humanitarian law, 150 civilians each day. It didn't count. It didn't matter if they were
Doctors, priests, infants, everyone was destroyable. Everyone was killable. Everyone was maimable. And this is how Israel had managed to kill 30,000, 30,000 Palestinians in Gaza alone in a few months. And it has used international law, jargon, to justify its operations. An international community has allowed it to do so, using evacuation orders, human shields, collateral damage, safe zones.
Nothing of this has ever been real. And still, this is the language that has allowed Israel to benefit from impunity.
Legally, how do you measure in the case of Gaza that there is an intention to destroy rather than what could be argued it's a criminal or reckless, even vengeful pursuit of war? Okay.
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Chapter 5: How does Francesca Albanese respond to accusations of antisemitism?
No. Was it justified under international humanitarian law? No. So why has it not been stopped? But there is another element. Certain crimes, when they are widespread and systemic, like the deprivation of food, the deprivation of humanitarian aid, And this is systemic. It's not a single act. It's not a single bombing. This is a crime against humanity.
Force displacement is a crime against humanity. Using starvation as a tool of war. It can be both a war crime, but when it's systematic and widespread, it's a crime against humanity. So why has this not been stopped? But the point is that the intention has been communicated. communicated by leaders, communicated by soldiers. We will annihilate Gaza. We will turn Gaza to the Middle Age.
There will not be Palestinians remaining in Gaza. Everyone is responsible. They are human animals. Even the newborns are responsible because they will grow into... This is really... You know that you have this kind of language in the Nuremberg trials? In the Nuremberg trials, there was an officer asked, but why would you kill civilians?
because they represented a security threat, including children, asked the prosecutors. Yes, because they will grow hating us for what we did to them.
Francesca, I don't think anyone listening doubts your passion, clarity, expertise on the subject. It's why people see you as brave and courageous and all those things. Of course, others have taken a very different view. And I want to talk about some of the criticisms leveled at you. Firstly, that you've been described as unfit for your role, that you lack the impartiality required for the UN.
How do you address that? What is impartiality?
This is my question. What is impartiality? Because impartiality is assessing the facts for what they are. Okay. And we are entitled machine to different opinions, but we are not entitled to different facts. So impartiality is to look at the facts for what they are and then draw conclusions. And my conclusions are always legal qualification. I don't say what I think as personal opinion. I think
produce legal analysis. So I tell the Israelis, the Israeli governments or the allies, Germany, Italy or France in Europe, challenge the facts, challenge the facts. They don't have arguments to challenge the facts. So they accuse me. And they think that they're going to, I mean, of course, they are harming me. Of course, of course, it's exhausting. And of course, it takes a psychological toll.
But look, if we were in 1938, people like me would endure the same, would be not heard or ridiculed or accused or vilified. But I would say, Today, everyone is morally clear that they would have defended the Jewish people 100 years ago. But 100 years ago, defending the Jewish people was not popular at all because the Jewish people were considered an unwanted population, an unwanted encumbrance.
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Chapter 6: What are the challenges of being a human rights advocate?
Now, firstly, in 2014, you said that the US was subjugated by the Jewish lobby, which you have apologised for. And then since then, there was a recent retweet which compared a photo of Benjamin Netanyahu to one of Adolf Hitler. And another tweet where you draw a direct link between the Holocaust and what is happening in Gaza.
You wrote in February 2024 that October 7th victims weren't killed because of their Judaism, but in reaction to Israel's oppression. Francesca, how do you explain those statements? How do you address them?
First of all, the question of the Jewish lobby being subjugating the US, I was referring to AIPAC. AIPAC is one of the largest lobbying groups who's on record for influencing US policy. Now, the thing is that I know now, like over a decade later, first of all, I never said anything like that in my capacity as a special rapporteur. I didn't apologize.
I clarified what I said because I've never meant to offend anyone, right? But I learned after that saying Jewish lobby is something anti-Semitic. I said, I'm really sorry if it caused suffering, but this was not intentional. And of course, I've not done it ever since. The other examples that you quote should be contextualized.
Because, of course, if you say, oh, you published a picture of Hitler and Netanyahu next to each other. OK, I would say people listening to you could say, oh, my God, this person is really... is really not even minded. But this is not what I did. There was a former UN official with 30 years experience in the US. So it's not a random guy.
He posted a picture of a cheering crowd receiving Hitler and next to a cheering crowd in the US receiving Netanyahu. It was about the cheering, the cheering of people who would then be accused of heinous crimes. And so I didn't post anything, I just commented under the picture. I was like, I've been thinking the same. Because yes, I've been thinking the same.
When I saw the US giving a standing ovation to Netanyahu, when there were already reports of war crimes and crimes against humanity, what's the point of receiving him and giving him a standing ovation? And actually I do make the connection, which doesn't mean a comparison. I do make the connection to the Holocaust all the time. And you know why? Because I'm European and this is my history.
Like any American, any US citizen should realize that their history is one of settler colonialism. Native Americans have been subjugated, oppressed, and eventually erased. So I'm telling people, never again is not a tribal slogan. We need to learn from the past because for decades, discriminating, mistreating the Jewish people, what's considered normal and acceptable in Europe.
Now it's not, but the accusation of antisemitism is being thrown at people as confetti, just as a way to distract from Israel's responsibilities.
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Chapter 7: What is the current state of international law according to Francesca Albanese?
What's the situation there day to day right now? It's horrible.
It's really horrible. The Gaza Strip was already one of the highest populated places in the world before October 2023. Now, Israel has occupied and has leveled to the ground most of the Gaza Strip. And the population that remains, about 1.8 million people, those who have not been killed, those who have not fled, they are corralled in a piece of land that is in proximity of the sea.
So, for example, last winter, they were living in makeshift tents which have not resisted the elements. There were storms that they were flooding. And now that the weather has improved and the temperature are rising, there is a plague of rodents attacking them. And there is no humanitarian aid properly entering.
There are civilian trucks, so good for sale, that have entered, but the Yale system has collapsed long ago. So they are just on a survival mode. And it's painful to see that intellectual media and many politicians have decided to move on.
What toll do you think it's had on you and your mental health, looking and studying and examining what's been happening in Gaza over the last couple of years?
It's dehumanizing. It's dehumanizing because, you know, I'm trained to interview victims of violence. I'm trained to deal with children who have gone through what the Palestinians have gone through. And at the same time, you are not supposed to do that on a daily basis for four years. So clearly it has taken a toll on me. Look, there is no softer pillow than a light conscience.
I'm so happy I have an opportunity to do the right thing instead of sitting in the margins and letting history be written by others. I've never been particularly, you know, I've never been an activist, so I've never been particularly courageous, particularly generous other than with my, in my own environment. This time I'm called
upon doing something that is bigger than me, is bigger than anything I've ever imagined doing in my life. And I take it humbly and I say, I'll do my best. And my sense of duty becomes only stronger with every day of unaddressed violence, of every day of non-delivered justice.
Francesca, when listeners are taking in everything you've said and when we look at what we've seen and what's happening in the world and commentators saying that there's been a death of international law and that when you look at what's happening, not just in Gaza, Ukraine, Venezuela, it's a collapse of the rules-based order.
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