UN Special Rapporteur Francesca Albanese Is Both Hated and Loved

Albanese wears her nails painted red with her black hair, along with a pair of dark glasses that add a touch of sternness to her fine facial features. During her speech, she uses the term genocide 27 times: Textbook genocide. Genocide of a colonial nature. Pointing a red, felt-tip pen at the audience, she says: "We have to stop the genocide.”

The admiration for Albanese here in the hall of the Círculo de Bellas Artes is palpable, as is a gentle breeze from hand-held fans, one side decorated with the pattern of the Kufiyah, the scarf associated with Palestine, the other printed as a cut open watermelon, in colors which recall the Palestinian flag – black, green, red – the hottest accessories of the 2025 Iberian summer season. One man calls out: "We are on the right side of history!”

A line forms after her speech: Diplomats-in-training, lawyers, artists – lining up for a hug, a selfie, an autograph. She is "courageous,” they say. An "example.” Someone who dares to speak the truth.

Francesca Albanese, 48, is an Italian legal scholar who has been the UN’s special rapporteur on the occupied Palestinian territories for the last three years and is currently one of the best-known personalities at the United Nations. She has proven more divisive than perhaps anyone else in the organization’s history: glorified as the voice of the oppressed, vilified as an anti-Semite. For one side, she is hope. For the other, hate.

Instead of hiding behind diplomatic semantics, she presents the war in the Middle East in simple messages: "GAZA. IS. STARVING. And Israel keeps on bombing it.” She combines "human rights principles with empathy,” is how a companion describes Albanese. For many, particularly for younger people and representatives from the Global South, she is a star.

Elsewhere, she is persona non grata, and not just in Jerusalem. When Albanese was scheduled to speak at Berlin’s Free University in February, the Israeli ambassador called it a "disgrace.” Berlin’s mayor, the Christian Democrat Kai Wegner, disregarding academic freedom, became involved. Three events in Germany were cancelled, officially due to security concerns, before an appearance finally did materialize, with a massive police presence, including armed officers inside the venue. There were apparently plans to arrest Albanese if she said anything approaching a violation of German law.

She hasn’t exactly gone out of her way to lower the temperature. Quiet tones aren’t part of her repertoire. In the past, she has pontificated about a powerful "Jewish lobby.” She sometimes refers to Isreal as the "bully of the region.” After the Hamas terror attack on October 7, 2023, she insisted that the victims had been killed "in response to Israel’s oppression,” for which she was officially censured by Germany, France and Canada.

Who is this woman who willingly places herself at the center of the global political storm? Is it necessary to be so undiplomatic when seeking to support the Palestinians? Or is Albanese’s lack of nuance destroying the last bridges in this conflict where gray tones have already largely vanished?

In a quiet street of the suburb of La Marsa, just outside Tunis, the fragrance of the sea hangs in the air. White villas are lined up next to each other, each framed by colorful bougainvillea bushes. It’s late May, and birdsong mingles with the rather unobtrusive noise of construction.

Albanese’s assistant opens the door. She is actually at Oxford University, she says, but she has been given permission to conduct research here on behalf of Albanese. She leads the way into the living room, where the coffee table is covered by hundreds of puzzle pieces. Albanese lives here with her two children and her husband, who works for the World Bank. The assistant requests a bit of patience, saying that the special rapporteur is still writing, with the new report scheduled to be presented in Geneva in a few weeks’ time. On X, Albanese has posted that she would leave any interview in which she was asked about the credibility of the numbers of victims in Gaza.

A few minutes later, she appears, wearing a flower-print blouse. She doesn’t smile.

"I have one hour.”

Her assistant has placed a mug from Amnesty International with a chip on the rim in front of the reporter. Albanese quickly pulls it toward her and requests a new one.

"I’ll get you a better mug.”

She says she is in constant contact with people in the Gaza Strip. She starts the conversation by saying: "It feels like being in a connection with someone who's in a concentration camp 100 years ago.” She looks into the reporter’s eyes as if trying to see how this comparison between Israel and the Nazi state will be received. "Why do they have to die in silence and in vain? Because the Israelis look more like us?” Her theory: "Racist we were, racist we are.”

Albanese’s report "Anatomy of a Genocide” appeared around six months after October 7, 2023. In it, she describes systematic patterns of violence that go beyond mere acts of war. History might ultimately prove her right. Numerous experts have now begun speaking of genocide. A verdict from the International Court of Justice is still pending.

Why are you so fearless, Ms. Albanese?

"It has to do with my people. I come from a region where women have this trait. We cut through the bushes. We're very direct. We speak mercilessly.”

She laughs – it’s like stumbling through a secret doorway to the other side of the wall.

Albanese grew up in the town of Ariano Irpino, in the southern Italian region of Campania. Her mother was a housewife, her father a lawyer. There were times, she says, when he would accept a palette of eggs in payment if his clients didn’t have the money for his fee. Her parents emphasized education and the house was full of books, including the works of Auschwitz survivor Primo Levi, which were, she says, formative for her. They would talk with friends about political developments around the world at the kitchen table. She says their heroes were judges who stood up to the mafia.

But when the family would visit relatives in northern Italy, she says, people looked down on her – because of her southern accent. Other children called her "terrona,” which means something like "country bumpkin.”

It may be a bit of a simplistic anecdote, but Albanese loves it. It was then, she says, that she became aware of what "discrimination” means, adding that she had a strong "sense of injustice.” She completed her master’s degree in human rights studies at the School of Oriental and African Studies in London, a talent factory for the global decolonization movement.

She says she only really learned English at age 20, and her second foreign language when she was 25. But she still ended up working for the United Nations, first in Africa, then in Geneva and finally in Jerusalem, with the relief agency for Palestinian refugees. In that place, with its beautiful evening light and charged atmosphere, she was overcome by a strange heaviness, she says. "I felt something I never felt before. I felt discomfort.” She says she had to stand by and watch as Palestinian families in the eastern part of the city were driven from their homes at night and could do nothing about it. "The international community was there and, yes, they would condemn it. And after a month, the same thing would happen again. It was a theater of the absurd.”

It was "paralyzing,” she says.

She ultimately left the organization, which she began at times to see as a part of the problem, an additional cog in the machinery that managed the conflict but never solved it. Her salary, she stresses, has never been more important to her than her principles.

As an independent special rapporteur, Albanese now has a mandate of the United Nations, but she is not an employee of the organization. She works pro bono, she says, and lives off her savings.

The UN currently has around 60 special rapporteurs working on issues like freedom of speech, people with albinism or the rights of indigenous peoples, all commissioned by the Human Rights Council. It is a role, say critics, that allows leeway for political activism under the banner of the United Nations.

As a sudden rain shower splashes down outside, Albanese says that she is actually quite a gentle person. But people have short attention spans, she adds, and you have to be unconventional to get them to listen.

Still, how helpful is it really to consistently label Israel as a "settler-colonial project”?

"The founding fathers of Israel talked about colonizing Palestine, because 100 years ago, talking about colonialism was kosher. It wasn’t problematic.”

Following the founding of the Israeli state in 1948, it was populated by Holocaust survivors and also by oppressed Jews from neighboring Arab countries. Does Albanese not consider this a unique situation?

Of course, she replies. The Holocaust made the situation incomparable.

But no two colonial endeavors look the same. Albanese does not want to hear about Israel having a special status today. Her guiding principle is: International law applies to everyone. She has been criticizing the Israeli occupation and "apartheid” for years, along with the impunity granted to the Jewish state. She sees what is happening in Gaza as the logical consequence of both, which is also why she doesn’t refer to what is currently happening as a war, but as a "project of ethnic cleansing.”

In her view, Europe is complicit – on the one hand through arms deliveries, and on the other through its silence, especially from politicians, and particularly in Germany. She compares this silence, too, to that during the Nazi era.

She says a German government official once told her that Germany doesn’t have just one reason of state, but two. There is the support for Israel, which former German Chancellor Angela Merkel famously established, but also the support of universal human rights, which Germany committed to in the wake of World War II to prevent another civilizational collapse.

The two of them, says Albanese, have been in conflict for quite some time.

And now, under the hail of bombs in Gaza, one might conclude, they have collided.

Albanese’s assistant appears and urges her to begin preparing for an evening appointment. The following morning, she will fly to the Cannes Film Festival before continuing onward to Bergamo for a TEDx talk on the subject of "power.”

Albanese declines to speak in detail about the threats that have been made against her and her family. She says there are attempts which look like "mafia intimidation” from "pro-genocide pressure groups,” as she calls them. "They depict me as a monster. It serves their propaganda.” She insists that she no longer pays any attention to them.

Albanese’s most industrious adversary is based in Geneva and is the executive director of UN Watch. The organization denounces real and alleged abuses at the UN, particularly at the Human Rights Council, which is dominated by countries from the Global South and which granted Albanese her mandate. Last year, the UN General Assembly passed 17 resolutions pertaining to Israel. There were four each on Myanmar and Russia, and two on Iran.

The door flies open even before the bell can be rung, the reporter having already been identified through the surveillance camera. Two reports compiled by UN Watch on Albanese are lying on a table in a conference room. One is called "Wolf in Sheep’s Clothing,” while the other is illustrated by a portrait of her against an ominous red background.

"I know them by heart,” says Hillel Neuer, a friendly man who has packed himself into a perfectly tailored suit. To be on the safe side, though, he had the reports printed out again. He fumbles around with a window. "Air conditioning isn’t allowed in Geneva,” he says with a disapproving shake of the head.

Hillel is a human rights lawyer who was born in Canada to a Jewish family that fled from Russia in 1904. He worked for a time in the U.S. for a large law firm, but now, he devotes most of his energy to the fight against the "demonization of Israel.”

Neuer believes that Albanese is making a decisive contribution to that demonization – through the trivialization of the Shoah, the "genocide lie,” which he sees as a "modern-day blood libel.” "For Albanese,” he says, "the genocide began in 1948.” In response to the accusation that Israel is a white colonialization project, he says: "It's absurd, Jews are indigenous to the land of Israel.” Jews, he says, have always been branded as the enemy of the zeitgeist.

Neuer’s organization publishes a constant stream of articles about Albanese on its website, sometimes several each day. But he still has difficulties grasping her – perhaps because there lurks a certain imprecision in his obsessive focus. Or maybe because he mixes everything up himself.

She is not a real human rights lawyer, he says – in contrast to himself, seems to be his message – because she has not taken a bar exam. She named her daughter Leila: Maybe after Leila Khaled, the airline hijacker from the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine? She received money for a trip inside Australia from an NGO with ties to Hamas, he points out. In fact, the organization in question posted a video to X in which the testament from the late Hamas leader Yahya Sinwar was read out loud – not exactly an indication of distance.

Albanese acts out of "a sick, twisted, pathological obsession,” Neuer says.

He alleges that she never talks about Israeli victims of human rights violations in the Palestinian Territories.

He says he is trying to stop looking at her tweets.

When informed that Albanese will soon be receiving a prize in Spain, he begins drumming on the table with all 10 fingers and rocking back and forth in his chair as though trying to prevent an implosion.

He has written a letter of complaint to U.S. Secretary of State Marco Rubio, he says.

Has Rubio responded?

"Not yet,” says Neuer.

Albanese is the first woman to have been named UN special rapporteur for the occupied Palestinian territories – and maybe that is making everything worse. She embodies the emotional authority of a mother, which is perhaps why so many people on the Israeli side feel so hurt by her. What is worse than a mother who loves the other child more? Because she considers it to be weaker?

During a three-day tour de force in Madrid, Albanese participates in podium discussions, conducts meetings with parliamentarians and gives interviews, during which she is again wearing the flower-patterned blouse.

Techno is playing in the hotel lobby; the weather outside is scorching. Where should we go? The closest option is a Starbucks, but Albanese responds to the suggestion with a glare.

Instead, an Indian restaurant is found. Albanese perches on a barstool in the entrance area and orders a coffee. She has seven minutes.

She fills the time by talking about her son, telling the story of him recently walking into the room as Albanese was reviewing amputations in Gaza. "Mama, who does this leg belong to?” he asked her. An image on her screen was showing a picture of a baby with an amputated limb – likely the baby whose photo had made the rounds on social media a few days prior.

The scene recalls a story that Albanese tells of her own childhood. When she was five years old, she says, she saw on television the massacres in the Palestinian refugee camps Sabra and Shatila in Lebanon – images of piles of bodies, people with limbs twisted around "like broken dolls.”

It’s time for her to go.

Albanese rushes back to the hotel, from the lobby up to her room. She reappears not even 10 minutes later, now completely in black with a sparkling belt around her waist and enveloped in a cloud of fresh, floral perfume.

The interview continues in the taxi.

On the previous evening, Albanese said from the podium that the Israelis were now stealing the land they hadn’t stolen in 1948.

Ms. Albanese, does Israel have the right to exist?

There is no such thing as the right of states to exist, she responds. "Israel is there. And people should accept it.” But Israel has to make space for the grievances of the Palestinians, "because they have been the victims of a huge historical injustice.”

Albanese tends to evade questions about the role played by neighboring Arab states and about potential political solutions to the Middle East conflict. She is not a politician, she says, and would also not be interested in giving a party where everyone could talk to each other.

Then, she is standing in front of an elevator and is faced with the question as to whether she has made any mistakes in her role as special rapporteur. She thinks for a bit. "Probably I could have been more strategic, more diplomatic. And I’m glad that I was not. No, I don’t think I made any mistake.” Diplomatic, she says on the way up, has become a rather ambiguous word, something that people use to justify avoiding having to do the right thing.

Why didn’t she condemn the Hamas terror attack more sharply?

She turns to her assistant. "Teresa, would you mind sending all the statements where I have condemned October 7?”

Next up for Albanese is filming for a documentary and a photo session, before she is then led into an auditorium bathed in red light where she is honored by the newspaper Público as "person of the year.” Four Spanish ministers are present, actors, the former Spanish prime minister José Zapatero tells the reporter that Albanese is "the only hope for peace in the world today.” The moderator hands her the prize while saying the present horrors in the Middle East are reminiscent of those committed by the "Nazi state.” Albanese stumbles a bit while delivering her acceptance speech, which rarely happens.

Afterwards, she clutches her head and says: "I don’t like being in the spotlight. I have to get out of here.” She skips out on the canapés and wine, disappearing into the night.

French-Israeli sociologist Eva Illouz is hardly one to be suspected of particularly boorish behavior, but when asked about Albanese, she briefly slips out of character, sticking her tongue out in the upholstered chair of an upscale Parisian seafood restaurant. For her, Albanese is the paradigm of a global left which, instead of promoting peace, portrays Israel as the "epicenter of evil.”

Illouz is a professor at the School for Advanced Studies in the Social Sciences in Paris and sort of the grande dame of relationship analysis in the age of digital capitalism. And she has always been one of the sharpest critics of the Israeli government. In 2021, she signed an open letter to then-chief prosecutor of the International Criminal Court, Fatou Bensouda, urging her not to trust Israeli agencies when it came to investigating possible war crimes. But now, she says, she has grown more careful. The global context, she says, has changed.

The Israelis, she says, aren’t just under shock because of October 7. An even greater shock came in the days that followed. When celebrations were held on October 8 on Sonnenallee in Berlin. When the first anti-Israeli protests took place at American universities on October 9. When, on October 10, the Palestinian representative at the UN spoke of a "genocidal campaign.”

"Really, Albanese should work with people like me,” says Illouz. Instead, she continues, the special rapporteur is alienating people on the traditional left like her.

There is a tweet from Albanese that illustrates how she speaks to the Israeli side. On International Women’s Day in 2024, she addressed female soldiers: "What have you done, what have you become? Dears, when you realize it, you will be haunted forever.” In Illouz’s eyes, these patronizing statements reveal more than just a lack of compassion for Israeli women. They dehumanize them, consistent with tropes of Jews being cruel and bloodthirsty.

By denying that there is a war at all, that there is a real enemy against whom Israelis have the right to defend themselves, Albanese is pushing them even further into a corner, says Illouz. People like her, she says, are the reason why Israelis no longer trust international organizations.

"Albanese combines hatred with the heartwarming rhetoric of human rights. It is a new, particularly confusing form of anti-Semitism.” Such language "obscures and distorts historical and military realities,” simplifies the world and radicalizes both sides – instead of seeking to restore trust. As such, says Illouz, Albanese has contributed to the politicization of international law – and that has not done the Palestinian cause any favors.

During the hot weeks of June, as the hunger crisis in Gaza worsens, Albanese manages to further intensify her metaphors. In one post on X, she writes about women in labor who must continue through pain and exhaustion to bring new life into the world. The same is true for humanity, she writes. "Today, we must all breathe through the pain and push all together, till we break the siege on Gaza.”

In the days leading up to the presentation of her new report in Geneva, her appearances grow increasingly martyr-like – the rings around her eyes becoming deeper and her cheeks more sunken. The University of Bern cancels a discussion with her.

Finally, it’s July 3, in Room XX of the Palais des Nations in Geneva, session 59, agenda item 7, she’s wearing her flowered blouse. Later, she would say she didn’t make it home before the presentation. Her husband packed a suitcase for her and brought it to Italy, where she picked it up during a stop there.

The seats allocated to the Israeli delegation are empty.

Albanese speaks of an "apocalypse” in Gaza. She speaks of the Tel Aviv stock exchange, which, she says, has seen a 213 percent rise since October 2023, and of the 85,000 tons of explosives unleashed on Gaza – six times the amount of Hiroshima. "One people enriched, one people erased.”

With her new report, she wants to demonstrate how companies are profiting from the war in Gaza. She mentions more than 40 companies by name, including weapons manufacturers, but also Microsoft, Chevron, Carrefour and Airbnb. Her message can be summed up as follows: Everyone who does business with Israel is complicit in genocide.

Albanese is demanding a complete boycott.

"Palestine is a revealer. A mirror held up to the world’s moral and political failure.” Now it is time to end the "system” exposed by her, time for a "rupture.”

One could call it human rights populism.

The administration of U.S. President Donald Trump has since written a letter to UN Secretary-General António Guterres urging him to dismiss Albanese. She is, according to the letter, waging an inacceptable war against the global economy.

Following her presentation, Human Rights Council member states and those with observer status are allowed to speak, one-and-a-half minutes each. She is met with solidarity from the Global South – from countries like Egypt, Uganda and Brazil. Iran speaks of an "Israeli regime” that doesn’t understand the language of "civilized nations.” Pakistan condemns the personal attacks against Albanese. The representative from the Maldives says what most in the room are likely thinking: What is happening in Gaza is a threat to the rules-based world order.

She does not, however, say what many are also likely thinking: The West has undermined this world order itself with its double standards.

Following the meeting, Albanese gives interviews in a small, glass-enclosed room. She looks tired. She says she has muscle pain and keeps breathing through the pressure. But she also looks happy. She says she has never before felt so connected with the member states. She says she feels appreciation for her work and also for her sacrifices.

She says her report was meant as an "awakening.” And she thinks it worked.

There is a sentence from the Palestinian poet Mahmoud Darwish that Albanese frequently quotes: "I am not my own.” Albanese uses it to express that she is serving a larger cause, that she is merely a vehicle for a higher goal. It is a messianic idea. She turns herself into canvas for projections in a sphere of the absolute, in which human rights per se are religiously charged.