Johannesburg (AFP) – The United Nations’ expert on Palestinian rights on Thursday denounced the US sanctions brought against her for criticising Washington’s policy on the Gaza war as “mafia-style techniques” to “dirty” her reputation.
In an interview with AFP, Francesca Albanese said she would present her latest report to the UN from South Africa as sanctions from Washington prevented her from travelling to New York.
US Secretary of State Marco Rubio in July announced sanctions against the outspoken UN special rapporteur on rights in the Palestinian territories, calling her criticism of the United States and Israel “biased and malicious”.
“I cannot go to the US,” Albanese told AFP in South Africa, where she was set to deliver the annual Nelson Mandela Lecture on October 25.
“My assets have been frozen. I have a US daughter, my husband works for a US-based organisation, and the entire family is paying because of it.”
“The sanctions that the US imposed on me are such an affront, not just against me, against the United Nations,” she told AFP.
She compared the move to “mafia-style techniques” in her native Italy: “dirtying someone with mud… to dissuade him or her from keeping on engaging on justice issues”.
“I keep on reminding myself this is not about me”, she said. “It’s about defending people who are being genocided right now, and I truly hope that the message will keep on being heard.”
Albanese, who is mandated by the UN but does not speak on its behalf, has faced harsh criticism by Israel and some of its allies over her long-standing accusations that Israel is committing genocide in Gaza.
UN investigators and several human rights groups, among them Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch, accuse Israel of committing genocide in the Palestinian territory, a charge that Israel has denied as “distorted and false”, while accusing the authors of antisemitism.
‘Global complicity’
“I don’t think I’m divisive, but of course, there are some who are very well-equipped and interested in ruining my reputation so that the message is not delivered,” Albanese said.
In a first version of her new report, titled “Gaza Genocide: a collective crime” and published on the UN website, the Italian expert denounced “a system of global complicity” and called on states to “immediately suspend and review all military, diplomatic and economic relations with Israel”.
“Even as the genocidal violence became visible, states, mostly Western ones, have provided, and continue to provide, Israel with military, diplomatic, economic and ideological support,” Albanese wrote, adding the countries eventually “could and should be held liable”.
With a fragile US-brokered truce in place under a deal to end the two-year Israel-Hamas war, Albanese said the international community and the multilateral order were being “put to the test”.
“Israel has pushed the world to confront its capacity to prevent genocide, and so far we have failed. Now the question is, will we be equally unable to stop the genocide and punish the genocide?” she said.
‘Financial architecture’
Presenting her report from South Africa — which has laid a case of genocide against Israel at the International Court of Justice — was “symbolic”, said Albanese, who has compared Israel’s treatment of Palestinians to the pre-1994 apartheid regime of racial segregation.
But South Africa, as a top supplier of coal to Israel, was still included in her report on states’ “complicity”.
That was “a revealer of the world that we live in”, she said, “where eventually getting rid of the economic and financial architecture that upholds our system and our societies is the crux of the matter.”
