Alvina Hoffmann at Aeon:
On 9 July 2025, the government of the United States imposed sanctions on Francesca Albanese, the UN special rapporteur on Palestine. Earlier in the spring, Albanese had written confidential letters to US companies, warning that she would name them in her forthcoming UN report for contributing to gross violations of human rights in Israel’s war in Gaza. The US administration framed these letters as a campaign of political and economic warfare. The sanctions against Albanese, an Italian-born legal scholar and human rights expert, are part of a broader executive order that sanctioned judges and prosecutors of the International Criminal Court. The US secretary of state Marco Rubio cited as the reason her direct engagement with the International Criminal Court ‘in efforts to investigate, arrest, detain, or prosecute nationals of the United States or Israel’. Albanese and the sanctioned ICC staff are now on the US Treasury Department’s Specially Designated Nationals list, alongside suspected terrorists, drug traffickers and arms dealers.
This is the first time the US has sanctioned a UN official, and the first time such a punishment was imposed on a UN special rapporteur for exercising their mandate.
More here.
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