Iran’s state-run PressTV on Wednesday heaped praise on Francesca Albanese, the United Nations Special Rapporteur for the Palestinians.
Albanese was hit with sanctions by the U.S. State Department on Wednesday for engaging in lawfare against Israel and the United States.
“The United States has repeatedly condemned and objected to the biased and malicious activities of Albanese that have long made her unfit for service as a Special Rapporteur,” Secretary of State Marco Rubio said when announcing the sanctions on Wednesday.
“Albanese has spewed unabashed antisemitism, expressed support for terrorism, and open contempt for the United States, Israel, and the West,” Rubio said.
“That bias has been apparent across the span of her career, including recommending that the ICC, without a legitimate basis, issue arrest warrants targeting Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and former Defense Minister Yoav Gallant,” he said.
As Rubio noted, neither the U.S. nor Israel is a party to the Rome Statute, the agreement that established the International Criminal Court, so Albanese’s efforts to use the ICC to harass American and Israeli officials constitutes a “gross infringement on the sovereignty of both countries.”
Rubio said Albanese has escalated her efforts by “writing threatening letters to dozens of entities worldwide, including major American companies across finance, technology, defense, energy, and hospitality, making extreme and unfounded accusations and recommending the ICC pursue investigations and prosecutions of these companies and their executives.”
“We will not tolerate these campaigns of political and economic warfare which threaten our national interests and sovereignty,” he said.
All of that sounded delightful to PressTV, which had no problem with the ICC issuing warrants for Netanyahu and Gallant:
The tribunal issued the warrants last November over the duo’s war crimes and crimes against humanity in the Gaza Strip, where the regime has been waging a strongly-US-supported war of genocide since October 2023.
Prior to the court’s issuance of the warrants, Albanese had authored a landmark report to the UN Human Rights Council, stating that the regime’s military operations in Gaza displayed “prima facie evidence of an intention to systematically destroy Palestinians as a group.” The atrocities, she had added, effectively indicated genocide under the UN’s Genocide Convention.
The run-up to authorization of the warrants also saw her propose that the UN consider suspending the regime’s membership for its deadly violations.
The Iranian state media agency lauded Albanese for “consistently” using the term “genocide” to describe Israel’s campaign in Gaza, demanding an arms embargo against Israel, and pushing countries around the world to divest from Israel — including the very same companies the State Department sanctioned her for harassing.
PressTV angrily complained the U.S. has “poured billions of dollars in military aid into the regime’s coffers to be used towards reinforcement of the genocide that has so far claimed the lives of nearly 57,700 Palestinians, mostly women and children.”
“Washington has also been lending the genocide unwavering political support by shielding Tel Aviv against punitive UN action,” PressTV huffed.
Albanese’s many critics took a very different view of the sanctions against her.
Anne Bayefsky, president of Human Rights Voices and director of the Touro Institute on Human Rights and the Holocaust, congratulated the State Department on Wednesday for “finally taking action against Albanese, her virulent and violent antisemitism, and her constant attacks on the United States, American businesses, and the very existence of the State of Israel.”
“Albanese poses a direct threat to the well-being and security of U.S. citizens — not to mention her utter disregard for the theoretical purposes and principles of the United Nations — and as such, the United States is not obligated to admit her,” Bayefsky said.
The sanctions announced by Rubio might block Albanese from entering the United States, where U.N. headquarters is located, although that detail was unclear as of Wednesday morning.
UN Watch Executive Director Hillel Neuer hailed Rubio’s action as “bold and courageous.”
“No UN official — in this case, a purported official, as her reappointment was illegal — has ever been sanctioned before in history,” Neuer said.
Neuer wrote to U.N. Secretary-General Antonio Guterres in April to argue that Albanese’s appointment to a second three-year term as Special Rapporteur on Human Rights in the Palestinian Territories was invalid because duly-filed formal complaints about Albanese’s “gross and systematic violations” of UN code were not properly considered.
The U.N. Human Rights Council was legally required to consider those complaints when judging if Albanese was fit to be retained for another term, but it failed to do so. Neuer warned Guterres that since Albanese’s reappointment was null and void, she would not be protected by diplomatic immunity if the various governments which have condemned her for inciting racism and antisemitism decided to take action against her.
“She will never again spread her poison on American campuses or enter the country. Justice is served. Good triumphs over evil,” Neuer said, presuming that Albanese would no longer be allowed to enter the United States.
Albanese herself was unsurprisingly contemptuous of the State Department sanctions, calling them “obscene” and comparable to “Mafia intimidation techniques.”
“Of course I’ve been critical of Israel. It has been committing genocide and crimes against humanity and war crimes,” she sputtered.
Albanese has refused to condemn the October 7 Hamas massacre; instead, she has repeatedly attempted to justify it as a legitimate response to “Israel’s oppression,” which earned her the condemnation of both the French and German governments in addition to the U.S. and Israel.
U.N. spokesman Stephane Dujarric on Thursday denounced the U.S. sanctions as “unacceptable” and said unilateral sanctions against any U.N. official or expert would set a “dangerous precedent.”
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