UN spokesperson calls US sanctions on Palestinian envoy ‘dangerous precedent’

The United Nations is pushing back against the United States after President Trump’s administration on Wednesday imposed sanctions on Francesca Albanese, the U.N. special rapporteur on the occupied Palestinian territories. 

The spokesperson for U.N. Secretary-General António Guterres, Stéphane Dujarric, said during a Thursday briefing that the Trump administration’s move to slap sanctions on Albanese, who has been critical of Israel’s war in Gaza and has accused the Jewish state of committing genocide in the war-torn enclave, sets a “dangerous precedent.”

Israel has consistently rejected the allegations. 

“Francesca Albanese, like all other Special UN Human Rights Rapporteurs, is an independent human rights expert appointed by the UN Human Rights Council and reporting to the Human Rights Council. Special Rapporteurs do not report to the Secretary-General, and he has no authority over them or their work,” Dujarric said Thursday. 

“That being said, Member States are perfectly entitled to their views and to disagree with the reports by the Special Rapporteurs, but we encourage them to engage with the UN human rights architecture,” Dujarric added. “The use of unilateral sanctions against special rapporteurs, or any other UN expert or official is unacceptable.” 

The Hill has reached out to the State Department for comment. 

Secretary of State Marco Rubio unveiled the sanctions against Albanese, an Italian legal scholar, on Wednesday, saying they were imposed over her “illegitimate and shameful efforts to prompt @IntlCrimCourt action against U.S. and Israeli officials, companies and executives.” 

“Albanese’s campaign of political and economic warfare against the United States and Israel will no longer be tolerated. We will always stand by our partners in their right to self-defense,” wrote Rubio, who is also Trump’s national security adviser. 

The U.S. mission to the U.N. has previously called for the envoy to be fired and has opposed her reappointment. Albanese was reappointed to another three-year term earlier this year. 

The sanctions came days after Albanese released an extensive report that probed the “corporate machinery sustaining Israel’s settler-colonial project of displacement and replacement of the Palestinians in the occupied territory,” adding that more than 60 companies were aiding Israel in their war against Hamas, a Palestinian militant group designated as a terrorist organization by the U.S. government.

Israel’s diplomatic mission has dismissed the report as “legally groundless, defamatory and a flagrant abuse of her office.”

Albanese indicated in an interview Thursday that sanctions will “only work if people are scared and stop engaging.”

“I want to remind everyone [that] the reason why these sanctions are being imposed is the pursuit of justice,” Albanese told Al Jazeera. “Of course I’ve been critical of Israel. It has been committing genocide and crimes against humanity and war crimes.”