Francesca Paola Albanese (; born 30 March 1977) is an Italian legal scholar and expert on human rights. She has served as the United Nations (UN) Special Rapporteur on the occupied Palestinian territories since 1 May 2022; initially appointed for a three-year term, she was confirmed for another three years in April 2025. She is the first woman to hold the position.
As part of her position as a UN special rapporteur, Albanese has been critical of Israel's occupation of the Palestinian territories and recommended in her first report that UN member states develop a plan to end the occupation and apartheid. After the Israeli invasion of the Gaza Strip, Albanese called for an immediate ceasefire and warned that Palestinians in Gaza were at risk of ethnic cleansing. In March 2024, Albanese reported to the UN Human Rights Council that Israel's actions in Gaza amounted to genocide. Pro-Israel organizations, including the U.S. government under Donald Trump, have accused Albanese of antisemitism and anti-Israel bias, and have called for her removal. Several human rights groups and numerous scholars of antisemitism have said the accusations are illegitimate attempts to discredit her. The UN published a report by Albanese in June 2025 stating that many corporate entities, including Microsoft, Alphabet Inc., and Amazon, were enabling and profiting from the occupation of Palestinian territories and the Gaza genocide. In response, the United States under the Trump administration imposed sanctions on Albanese under Executive Order 14203 naming her a "specially designated national", forbidding all U.S. persons and companies from doing business with her.
Albanese holds a law degree with honours from the University of Pisa and a Master of Laws in human rights from SOAS University of London. She was an affiliate scholar at the Institute for the Study of International Migration at Georgetown University until late 2025, when the University stated it was ended due to the U.S. sanctions. She is a senior advisor on Migration and Forced Displacement at the non-profit Arab Renaissance for Democracy and Development.
Early life and education Francesca Paola Albanese was born in Ariano Irpino, a town in the Campania region of southern Italy, on 30 March 1977.
Albanese holds a full Italian law degree (LMG with honours from the University of Pisa). In a May 2025 interview, she said that she had studied jurisprudence and had not taken the bar examination because she was more interested in human rights and did not want to practice law in Italy.
She later earned a Master of Laws in human rights from SOAS University of London.
Career Albanese was an affiliate scholar at the Institute for the Study of International Migration at Georgetown University until late 2025, when the University stated it was ended as a result of US sanctions imposed on her. She is a senior advisor on Migration and Forced Displacement at the non-profit Arab Renaissance for Democracy and Development (ARDD), where she co-founded the Global Network on the Question of Palestine. In 2020, she and Lex Takkenberg wrote the OUP-published Palestinian Refugees in International Law.
Albanese worked for a decade as a human rights expert for the UN, including the Office of the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights and the UN Relief and Work Agency for Palestine Refugees. During this period, she advised the UN, governments, and civil society in the Middle East, North Africa, and the Asia Pacific regions on human rights and their application and norms, particularly for vulnerable groups like refugees and migrants. She holds lectures on international law and forced displacement in both European and Arab universities, as well as conferences and public events about the Israeli–Palestinian conflict.
UN Special Rapporteur on the occupied Palestinian territories On 1 May 2022 Albanese was appointed UN Special Rapporteur on the occupied Palestinian territories for a three-year term. Albanese is the second Italian (after Giorgio Giacomelli) and the first woman to be appointed to the position. Her appointment generated some controversy due to comments she made criticising the US and Europe during the 2014 Gaza War. Albanese said the United States was "subjugated by the Jewish lobby", which she later said she regretted, and Europe by a "sense of guilt about the Holocaust", and that both "condemn the oppressed – the Palestinians" in the conflict. The Israeli Ministry of Foreign Affairs and Michele Taylor, the US ambassador to the UN Human Rights Council, suggested the comments were antisemitic. Albanese said that she had never been antisemitic and that her criticism of Israel is related to its occupation of Palestinian territories.
On 18 October 2022, Albanese recommended in her first report that UN member states develop "a plan to end the Israeli settler-colonial occupation and apartheid regime". The report concluded: "The violations described in the present report expose the nature of the Israeli occupation, that of an intentionally acquisitive, segregationist and repressive regime designed to prevent the realization of the Palestinian people's right to self-determination."
During the 30th Meeting of the 53rd Regular Session of the UN Human Rights Council in July 2023, Albanese presented a report accusing Israel of turning the West Bank into an "open-air prison". The report said that since 1967, more than 800,000 Palestinians, including children as young as 12, had been arrested and detained by Israeli authorities. Briefing journalists, Albanese said: "There is no other way to define the regime that Israel has imposed on the Palestinians – which is apartheid by default – other than an open-air prison." Israel was not present for the presentation but rejected the findings.
In August 2024, Albanese was one of many UN Special Rapporteurs who signed an open letter to the "International community" on the third anniversary of the Taliban taking change in Afghanistan. They were concerned that the regime's human-rights abuses particularly against women and girls may become accepted. They encouraged the International Criminal Court (ICC) to take urgent action against those responsible.
Albanese was confirmed in the position for another three years in April 2025.
In September 2026, Albanese stated that the Western world should stop sending weapons to Ukraine during the Russo-Ukrainian War and seek a political solution. She accused both NATO and the United States of prolonging the conflict, and stated that Russia's invasion of Ukraine was unlawful. When asked how she believed the war should end, Albanese said she did not have a solution because she was not an expert.
Later that month, Albanese apologized in a social media post on X for statements she had made in an interview, acknowledging that she had "misread the term 'Muselmann' (Muslim) used in Nazi camps for prisoners at the brink of death, wrongly inferring that the term antisemitism originally meant hatred of all Semitic peoples" rather than having been invented as a term to specifically denote hatred of Jews. A statement from Yad Vashem said that Albanese should "familiarize herself with the history she seeks to address, particularly the rise of Nazi antisemitism and the ideology that paved the way for the Holocaust, before making assertions about it".Kehnemui, Sharon. "UN Rapporteur Albanese Walks Back Claim That Antisemitism Refers to All People of the Middle East; Albanese’s contortion of a concentration camp shorthand for the imminently dying as a reference to Muslims demonstrated profound lack of knowledge about the Holocaust, scholar says.", The New York Sun, September 28, 2026. Accessed September 29, 2026. "As it relates to Jews and the Holocaust, Ms. Albanese also missed the mark by referring to 'Musselmann' as a reference to Muslims. While the word is possibly an adaptation of Turkish used in German, Yiddish, and other languages, its use in concentration camps referred to the resignation and indifference of prisoners in the death throes of starvation and exhaustion, regardless of race, ethnicity, or religion."Tress, Luke. "UN’s Albanese walks back claims that Nazis labeled death camp victims ‘Muslims,’ that antisemitism isn’t only about Jews", The Times of Israel, September 28, 2026. Accessed September 29, 2026. "The UN special rapporteur for the Palestinians, Francesca Albanese, apologizes for claiming that the Nazis called their death camp victims “Muslims” and that antisemitism is not only about hatred of Jews. Albanese said last week in an interview that antisemitism “is not just discrimination against Jews. It’s discrimination against Semitic peoples,” and claimed that, when the term was coined in the late 19th century, it referred to all non-Europeans.... 'The Special Rapporteur would do well to familiarize herself with the history she seeks to address, particularly the rise of Nazi antisemitism and the ideology that paved the way for the Holocaust, before making assertions about it,' the statement adds."
Gaza war
In 2023, after the outbreak of the Gaza war, Albanese called for an immediate ceasefire, warning that "Palestinians are in grave danger of a mass ethnic cleansing." She further stated that the international community must "prevent and protect populations from atrocity crimes", and that "accountability for international crimes committed by Israeli occupation forces and Hamas must also be immediately pursued."
In February 2024, French President Emmanuel Macron described the October 7 attacks as "the largest antisemitic massacre of our century". Albanese responded on X (formerly Twitter) that "the victims of the October 7 massacre were killed not because of their Judaism, but in response to Israeli oppression". The French Foreign Ministry condemned her remarks and the Israeli government declared Albanese persona non grata in Israel and denied her future entry to the country. In response to the reactions, Albanese said: "I regret that some interpreted my tweet as 'justifying' Hamas's crimes, which I have condemned strongly several times. I reject all forms of racism, including antisemitism. However, labeling these crimes as 'antisemitic' obscures the real reason they occurred."
On 26 March 2024, Albanese presented the report "Anatomy of a Genocide" before the 55th session of the UN Human Rights Council in Geneva, stating "reasonable grounds" to believe that Israel is intentionally committing at least three "genocidal acts" against the Palestinians as a group in Gaza proscribed in the Genocide Convention: "Killing members of the group"; "Causing serious bodily or mental harm to members of the group"; "Deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part". Albanese called for sanctions and an arms embargo. She was one of the many UN experts who spoke out against the sale of arms to Israel in June 2024 to be used in the conflict in Gaza. The experts cautioned arms suppliers and finance companies that they would be implicated in human rights violations. The signatories to the warning included special reporteurs Paula Gaviria Betancur, Tlaleng Mofokeng, and Margaret Satterthwaite. Furthermore, she points to the settler colonial context of genocidal practices resulting in "destruction and replacement of Indigenous peoples", and recommends the "reconstitution of the United Nations Special Committee against Apartheid" to address the situation in Palestine.