Leaders of Spanish and French Jews protested a decision by the government of Spain’s Basque Region to award a prize named for a French Jewish human rights and Zionist activist René Cassin to U.N. Special Rapporteur on the Occupied Palestinian Territories Francesca Albanese.
The Federation of Jewish Communities in Spain (FCJE) and the CRIF umbrella group of French Jewish communities issued a joint statement Monday against the Dec. 1 decision to honor Albanese with the award bearing the name of Cassin, the author of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, for which he received the Nobel Peace Prize in 1968.
The Basque decision is “a distortion of Cassin’s legacy and a serious misunderstanding of human rights values,” FCJE and CRIF said.
The groups cited Albanese’s history of making both antisemitic statements and denying antisemitism as a factor in Israel-hatred. In February 2024, she wrote on X to French President Emmanuel Macron that the victims of Hamas’s Oct. 7, 2023, massacres in Israel were “not killed because of their Jewishness, but as a reaction to Israel’s oppression.”
In 2014, she stated: “America and Europe, one of them subjugated by the Jewish lobby, and the other by the sense of guilt about the Holocaust.” Albanese has since said that she regrets this remark.
The Basque Region’s government said in a statement that Albanese is “guided by the principles of legality, justice and human dignity, and she has contributed to making visible the situation of people affected by occupation and conflict, as well as to promoting accountability and the effective respect of universal rights.”
She is to receive the award at a ceremony in Bilbao on Wednesday.
Animosity to Israel is prevalent in Spain, whose government accused Israel of perpetrating a “genocide” in Gaza, along with the government of fellow E.U. member state Ireland. Basque separatists have a long history of opposing Israel’s existence and even collaborating with Arab terrorists.
Queried by JNS, a prominent British-Jewish charity named for René Cassin said it does “not hold a position” on the decision to honor Albanese with an award named for its namesake.
An outspoken Zionist who said in a 1974 interview that “Israel has a love of the land and it educates its youth in that love and that will assure its permanence,” Cassin also said he was in “complete admiration” of the Jewish state shortly before his passing in 1976.
The left-leaning British charity named for him, whose mission statement says it promotes human rights, does “not intend to comment on this matter” of the award honoring Albanese, the charity’s executive director, Mia Hasenson-Gross, told JNS.
Since becoming the U.N. special rapporteur in 2022, Albanese has largely refrained from making public observations about Jews and has focused on trying to create false equivalences between Nazi Germany and Israel, and between the Holocaust and Israel’s treatment of Palestinians.
In August 2024, Albanese likened Israel’s war against Hamas in the Gaza Strip to the Holocaust, calling it a “concentration camp of the 21st century.”
In July of that year, Albanese trivialized the Holocaust, reposting an image comparing Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu to Adolf Hitler, with the comment: “This is precisely what I was thinking today.”
The American government, under U.S. President Donald Trump, sanctioned Albanese in early July after she sent letters to American entities accusing them of complicity in alleged Israeli crimes and recommending that the International Criminal Court in The Hague, to which Washington is not a signatory, investigate them.
