A U.S. appeals court reinstated sanctions on May 22 against Francesca Albanese, a U.N. rapporteur for the Palestinian territories who has long been accused of antisemitism.
The Friday decision from the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit stayed a lower court order from mid-May that had blocked State Department sanctions imposed on Albanese, reversing U.S. District Court Judge Richard J. Leon’s preliminary finding that the sanctions violated Albanese’s free speech rights in a case brought by Albanese’s husband and daughter.
That finding led the U.S. Department of the Treasury to post to its website on May 20 that Albanese had been deleted from its list of sanctioned foreign nationals.
Albanese posted to X on May 14, “US court ha [sic] suspended the US sanctions against me! As the judge says: ‘Protecting the Freedom of speech is always just the public interest.’ ” On May 21, The New York Times reported she had “won a significant legal skirmish with the United States government.”
However, the U.S. appeals court said the Trump administration could “implement and enforce Albanese’s designation as a designated foreign national” while the court considers the government’s emergency appeal.
On May 23, U.N. Watch’s Hillel Neuer posted to X in a message directed at Albanese: “I tried to explain to you that the injunction was only temporary and was likely to be frozen and overturned by the appeals court, but as a non-lawyer who falsely claims to be a lawyer, you were either unwilling or unable to understand.”
Neuer was referring to a controversy from last year when it was revealed that Albanese, who referred to herself as a lawyer, never passed the bar exam. She finally admitted in a May 27, 2025, interview with Vanity Fair that she never took the test “because I’m not a lawyer, and I never wanted to do it.”
Although UN Watch has demanded since June 2025 that her designation as a lawyer be removed from her official U.N. biography page, the description still describes her as “an international lawyer, specialized in human rights and the Middle East.”
U.S. Secretary of State Marco Rubio imposed sanctions on Albanese on July 9, 2025, “for her illegitimate and shameful efforts” to encourage the International Criminal Court in the Hague (ICC) to investigate U.S. and Israeli officials.
Neither the United States nor Israel is a signatory to the Rome Statute that created the ICC, “making this action a gross infringement on the sovereignty of both countries,” Rubio said in a July 2025, statement announcing the sanctions against Albanese.
Albanese wrote “threatening letters to dozens of entities worldwide, including major American companies... 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,” said Rubio. “We will always stand by our partners in their right to self-defense.”
Albanese proudly boasts of her efforts. As recently as May 18, she posted to X: “For 4 yrs I have urged the ICC to investigate and prosecute Israeli officials for int’l crimes in Palestine.”
“Albanese has spewed unabashed antisemitism, expressed support for terrorism and open contempt for the United States, Israel and the West,” Rubio noted.
Most recently, on May 16, she described the scandalous May 11 story by New York Times writer Nicholas Kristof, which accused Israel of training police dogs to rape prisoners (something which animal experts say is impossible), as “accurate but barely scratching the surface.”
In May 2025, she herself accused Israel of torturing and raping Gazans using dogs, said the United States was “subjugated by the Jewish lobby” and claimed Zionists faked antisemitic incidents in the United States.
In February 2024, she wrote on X to French President Emmanuel Macron that the victims of the Oct. 7, 2023, onslaught were “not killed because of their Jewishness, but as a reaction to Israel’s oppression.”
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 Nazi genocide, reposting an image comparing Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu to Adolf Hitler, with the comment: “This is precisely what I was thinking today.”
