RESPONSE TO MY DETRACTORS By Francesca Albanese

By Francesca Albanese

Le Monde diplomatique,

Tuesday, March 31, 2026

On March 23, 2026, UN Special Rapporteur Francesca Albanese published a new report—"Torture and Genocide"—which supports the characterization of the events in the Palestinian territories occupied by Israel as genocide. She establishes a precise sequence of events: since October 7, 2023, torture has been used systematically—in prisons, including against minors—and has since spread beyond detention facilities. This is compounded by bombings, forced displacement, and the destruction of living conditions. This is not an isolated incident but a deliberate pattern: coercion is exerted on both bodies and living conditions, reaching the threshold of genocide. The report was rejected by Israeli authorities and contested by several Western governments. In France, in February 2026, Foreign Minister Jean-Noël Barrot called for Ms. Albanese's resignation, based on distorted statements. In our columns, she analyzed these violent attacks as a way to evade the content of her work.

Anatomy of a Defamation

Response to my detractors

by Francesca Albanese

For more than two years, my mandate has been the subject of carefully orchestrated controversies, and of increasing virulence. On February 8, a French member of parliament attacked me personally on the basis of truncated statements attributing to me that Israel "is the common enemy of humanity", whereas my speech was aimed at the countries that have armed Israel, as well as the media and social network algorithms that have amplified the genocidal discourse (1).

Without bothering to verify the exact content of my statements or examine the facts, French Foreign Minister Jean-Noël Barrot immediately echoed these attacks internationally, condemning as "outrageous and reprehensible" remarks I never made and announcing that France would refer the matter to the United Nations Human Rights Council to call for my resignation.

His Italian, German, and Czech counterparts followed suit, without carrying out even the basic fact-checking required by their positions. On February 19, French Prime Minister Sébastien Lecornu publicly reiterated the same demand.

While criticism is inherent to any public function, even more so when it concerns human rights, this case reveals a troubling aspect: the relentlessness with which some states prefer to attack the messenger rather than try to refute the message.

The unprecedented and corrosive nature of this attack against an independent expert appointed by the United Nations stems not only from the violence of the accusations and the deliberate fabrication of lies, but also, and above all, from the fact that the highest levels of government are directing and endorsing this maneuver. It is therefore no longer a mere controversy, but a symptom of the bankruptcy of a system built on solemn promises and international treaties that are invoked in peacetime but buried as soon as their implementation becomes inconvenient.

Appointed by the United Nations Human Rights Council, I have been Special Rapporteur since May 1, 2022, and will serve until 2028. The eighth holder of this mandate — and the first woman in this position — I took on this voluntary commitment after a career dedicated to the defense of human rights, mainly with the United Nations — notably at the Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights and the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East (UNRWA) in Jerusalem — and to academic research on Palestine.

The attention paid to Israel is neither a personal choice nor a bias: it stems from Human Rights Council resolution 1993/2A, adopted on February 19, 1993 in response to nearly thirty years of occupation of Gaza, the West Bank and East Jerusalem.

Accusing me of "lacking neutrality" amounts to a deliberate distortion of this mandate. None of the fourteen other UN Special Rapporteurs with country mandates are subjected to such attacks; no one accuses the rapporteurs responsible for Afghanistan, Russia, or Iran of "obsession" in carrying out their mission. But as soon as Israel is involved, the ordinary fulfillment of a mandate becomes, in the eyes of some, even within governments, a fault to be justified rather than a duty to be fulfilled.

My work consists of establishing and legally classifying facts in the occupied territories, where an institutionalized legal dualism reigns: civil law applies to Israeli settlers and military law to Palestinians, including children.

Indeed, Israel is the only country in the world where children are systematically prosecuted in military courts. Describing this system as apartheid exercised against Palestinians in the form of a military dictatorship is not a provocation but a legal qualification. My initial reports submitted to the UN in 2022-2023 documented the systematic obstruction of the Palestinian people's right to self-determination, the arbitrary and systematic deprivation of liberty, and the structural impact of the occupation on children (2).

An open-air panopticon

The right to live freely as a people, to decide its political voice, to manage its resources, to chart its own future—self-determination is a prerequisite for the exercise of all other rights. Its denial lies at the heart of every colonial settlement project. For decades, territorial fragmentation, settlement expansion, restrictions on movement, work, education, and access to justice, land confiscation, the demolition of tens of thousands of homes, the isolation of Gaza, and the nearly 6,000 deaths, including approximately 1,200 children, caused by Israeli attacks between 2008 and 2022 have made any prospect of a free and independent life unlikely.

Throughout the occupied Palestinian territory, Israel has established a carceral regime—of varying intensity and methods—that constrains all dimensions of daily life. Constantly monitored, hampered in their movements by checkpoints, walls and an oppressive bureaucratic network, perpetually exposed to arrest and arbitrary detention, torture and other cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment, Palestinians live in what amounts to an open-air panopticon (3).

Completed just before and presented just after the attacks of October 7, 2023, my report on childhood is both the most damning and the least discussed. It addresses the process of “unchilding,” a term borrowed from the Israeli-Palestinian academic Nadera Shalhoub-Kevorkian (4), to describe the daily lives of children deprived of protection and innocence, growing up amidst pervasive violence: killed, maimed, orphaned, witnesses to the death or perpetual humiliation of their loved ones and the destruction of their homes. To ignore their despair is to renounce a part of our humanity and to violate the most sacred obligation in the world and in international law: to protect children.

My report of March 2024 follows this same approach; it also focuses on the victims of a structured system. Entitled "Anatomy of a Genocide (5)", it documents the first five months of Israeli attacks on Gaza after the massacres committed by Hamas on October 7, 2023: murders, serious physical and mental harm, subjection to living conditions aimed at the destruction of the group, against a backdrop of dehumanizing rhetoric emanating from state officials.

During this period, Israel disguised its actions with a "humanitarian camouflage," phrased in soothing language — "conflict," "collateral damage," "safe zones," "evacuation orders" — to justify the gradual erasure of Gaza and its identity, the suppression of the Palestinians' ability to exist as a community, to inhabit their land, to transmit their memory.

In the following report, "Colonial Erasure by Genocide (6)," I showed how this genocide extends into the West Bank and East Jerusalem through ethnic cleansing, the whole forming the logical outcome of a settler-colonial enterprise: erase to replace, destroy to appropriate.

I am not alone in reaching such conclusions. As early as January 2024, the International Court of Justice (ICJ) determined that there was a plausible risk of a violation of the Genocide Convention and ordered provisional measures. In July 2024, the Court also ruled that Israel's presence in the occupied Palestinian territory was illegal and demanded its immediate and unconditional cessation.

Finally,the Court found evidence of systemic discrimination, violations of the prohibition of racial segregation and apartheid, as well as annexation policies.

Countless institutions and organizations have concluded that Israel is committing genocide against the Palestinian people in the little territory that remains of Palestine.

Israeli historian Raz Segal sounded the alarm in October 2023. In 2024, Israeli historians specializing in the Holocaust, such as Amos Goldberg and Omer Bartov, also believed that their country was committing genocide (7).

A few months later, Amnesty International reached the same conclusion, and, in July 2025 (, the Israeli organization B'Tselem published a report to that effect under a damning title, even more striking when one imagines it in Hebrew: "Our Genocide" (9).

Finally, and among many others, in September 2025, the independent international commission of inquiry mandated by the UN also stated that a genocide was taking place in Gaza (10).

Despite meticulous documentation of the crimes committed, these reports received little to no attention from the media and Western governments. In the absence of a formal judicial decision, the commission of inquiry represents the closest thing to a quasi-judicial conclusion based on the establishment of facts and an analysis of the law.

In any event, the obligation to prevent genocide arises as soon as a serious risk is identified. In January 2024, when the ICJ recognized a plausible risk in Gaza, states had to act—starting by suspending arms transfers.

My analysis of the complicity of certain companies, published in July 2025, provoked the most virulent reactions. In it, I describe the "economy of genocide (11)": a network of private actors who, through their investments, technologies, services and supply chains, materially support the reality described in previous reports.

Such involvement entails their responsibility. Ending genocide also means dismantling the economic structures that make it possible—and profitable.

This report led the United States to impose draconian sanctions on me starting in August 2025—a practice already applied to judges of the International Criminal Court (ICC) and several Palestinian organizations.

I am financially cut off from the world. Anyone with ties to me, including members of my family (I am the mother of a daughter who is a U.S. citizen), faces fines of $1 million and twenty years in prison. My ability to carry out my duties and, quite simply, to live my life is severely hampered.

Although these attacks are supported by my own country, Italy, and in the absence of concrete support from other states, I have continued my mission. My most recent report describes the genocide in Gaza as a “collective crime (12),” because it was made possible and financed by the unwavering political and military support of several states, including those that are now attacking me most vigorously.

The United States remains by far the largest supplier of arms to Israel, while several member states of the European Union continue to fuel these transfers; the Union also remains Tel Aviv's largest trading partner.

With a few exceptions, such as Spain or Slovenia, the states of the Old Continent have chosen inaction or complicity.

France, for example, has repeatedly allowed Benjamin Netanyahu to fly over its airspace despite the ICC arrest warrant issued against him. Paris has continued trading in military equipment, facilitated transit through its ports and airports, and maintained intense trade relations with Israel.

Major French banks finance companies linked to the Israeli military industry and settlements, while several thousand French-Israelis serve in the Israeli army.

Criminalizing solidarity

At the same time, the repression of protests intensifies: demonstrations are banned, academic conferences censored, activists and journalists accused of "apology for terrorism," and police interventions are violent.

Germany, Italy, France, and the United Kingdom are at the forefront of this crackdown, under the guise of a legitimate fight against antisemitism.

Draft laws propose conflating the essential fight against antisemitism and all forms of racism with a prohibition on any criticism of Israel as a state. Presented as self-evident, this conflation of our Jewish brothers and sisters with Israeli politics is part of a political offensive: to instrumentalize the fight against antisemitism in order to criminalize expressions of solidarity with the Palestinian people and justify smear campaigns.

Because they criticize Tel Aviv's policies, Israeli citizens and Jewish people around the world are subjected to the same smear campaigns. Their voices are silenced, and their loyalty is questioned.

Anti-Semitism, horrible and odious, is hatred of Jews: it has nothing to do with the work of those who defend human rights, which focuses on the analysis of the actions of a State.

The entire system of international law rests on the principle of state responsibility. States assume and bear legal obligations, and they are the ones who must answer, first and foremost, for their violations. Israel is no exception: criticism of the State of Israel is not directed at what the State of Israel is or the religion it professes, but at what it does, particularly with regard to international law, which it violates gravely, repeatedly, and with persistent impunity.

The question raised is not ideological but legal: is France respecting its international obligations by taking such actions? My mandate as Special Rapporteur taught me one essential thing: when power is challenged, it doesn't debate, it strikes. Smearing to discredit, intimidation to silence; violence betrays nervousness rather than strength.

My work follows in the footsteps of my predecessors: John Dugard, Richard Falk, and Michael Lynk. They too were accused of antisemitism or complicity with terrorism. Against them, too, was deployed the tactic of substituting polemics for documented facts, ad hominem attacks for legal analysis. The mechanism is now well-established.

Pro-Israel groups—led by UN Watch, based in Geneva—have for years produced defamatory reports against anyone, especially within the United Nations, who documents violations of international law committed by Tel Aviv. Under the pretext of counteracting “disproportionate treatment of Israel,” these actors isolate and fragment statements to distort their meaning, then amplify and repeat their disinformation until it appears to be true.

On closer inspection, the "reports" of these groups ring hollow. Within the United Nations, their mendacious and defamatory nature has long been known. The accusations that I justified the atrocities of October 7, 2023, denied sexual violence, or minimized the suffering of hostages stem from this fabrication, even though I have unequivocally and relentlessly condemned the attacks against Israeli civilians on October 7 and Hamas's crimes in general.

I have unequivocally condemned them as war crimes and crimes against humanity, the perpetrators of which must be brought to justice through international proceedings. I have condemned the sexual violence committed against Israeli victims, as documented by the United Nations Commission of Inquiry (13), and, in accordance with international law, I consider rape used in a context of hostility to be a weapon of war that may constitute a war crime and, depending on the circumstances, a crime against humanity.

International justice does not operate through selective outrage or political manipulation. It is based on the legal classification of facts, the establishment of individual responsibilities, and respect for due process for everyone, without exception.

While my condemnation of the massacres and other crimes against Israeli civilians has been unequivocal, I have contested the widespread claim, especially in France for some reason which escapes me, that they were primarily motivated by anti-Semitism (14): as eminent specialists of the Holocaust and anti-Semitism have pointed out, this reading is both erroneous and dangerous, because it obscures the structural causes of the violence and distorts its analysis (15).

While anti-Semitism may have played a role on an individual basis for some of the attackers, these massacres, as the Secretary-General of the United Nations, Mr. António Guterres, stated, took place in the context of fifty-six years of suffocating occupation (16).

No crime justifies another crime. But ignoring the context perpetuates a distorted interpretation that risks fueling the cycle of violence instead of resolving it, endangering both Palestinians and Israelis.

We must name what this campaign reveals: the energy deployed to slander me contrasts sharply with the silence surrounding the ongoing crimes in Gaza and the inaction regarding those subject to international arrest warrants before the ICC. Under the pretext of "holding the UN accountable," the real aim is to redefine the defense of human rights as a partisan stance.

The irony is stark. In September 2025, France recognized the State of Palestine, a gesture hailed as a strong signal, a symbolic turning point. But recognizing a state whose occupier one actively supports, without exerting pressure to ensure that the occupier respects international law and proceeds with the unconditional withdrawal from the occupied territories demanded by the ICJ, is more a matter of diplomatic posturing than legal and political commitment.

Recognizing a state without territory, without sovereignty, without an end to the occupation, is nothing but empty rhetoric, especially when one simultaneously seeks to intimidate the experts mandated to document precisely the violations that make the actual creation of this state impossible. One cannot recognize Palestine on Monday and then try to silence its defenders the rest of the week.

The leaders who play this game are not only targeting me personally. They are sacrificing the international legal order itself, and accelerating the dismantling of international humanitarian law and the institutions that guarantee it, at the very moment when their survival is at stake.

It's possible to flee from the truth, but much harder to hide it. It's only a matter of time before justice comes knocking on the door of those responsible for crimes in Gaza and their accomplices.

The destruction of Gaza has awakened consciences that were thought to be anesthetized and has made visible what many refused to see: not only the brutality of the occupation, but the active complicity of our Western democracies in its perpetuation.

Because Israel is not an anomaly in the world order; in many respects, it is its mirror, in which we discover logics of exception, colonial hierarchies between lives worthy of mourning and lives to be sacrificed, a rhetoric of security that guarantees impunity.

Most Western governments do not confront Israel, because doing so would call themselves into question.

Homeland of human rights?

That is why it is both instructive and saddening that France, the self-proclaimed homeland of human rights, finds itself on the front line, not to defend a principle, but to protect a status quo; not to promote international law, but to neutralize its guardians.

However, something has changed. A movement has emerged — on campuses, social networks, in the streets, in courtrooms — that demands real social justice, effective respect for human rights, decolonial multilateralism, and the universality of its principles without exception.

A universality that rejects apartheid, even when practiced by a state allied with Western capitals.

This movement will not be silenced by smear campaigns. It will not be discouraged by sanctions or repression.

It grows and strengthens as the lies and distortions that seek to disqualify it are revealed.

Shared and adapted from Le Monde diplomatique

https://www.monde-diplomatique.fr/2026/03/ALBANESE/69365