US Removes UN Gaza Rapporteur Francesca Albanese From Sanctions List

The United States has removed U.N. special rapporteur Francesca Albanese from its sanctions list, according to a May 20 notice posted by the Treasury Department's Office of Foreign Assets Control.

The notice said Albanese, listed as Francesca Paola Albanese, had been deleted from the Specially Designated Nationals list under an International Criminal Court-related sanctions program.

The sanctions barred her from entering the United States and banking there.

The move came a week after a federal judge temporarily blocked enforcement of the sanctions, finding that the Trump administration likely violated Albanese's free-speech rights by imposing the measures.

Albanese, an Italian lawyer based in Tunisia, serves as the "U.N. special rapporteur on the situation of human rights in the Palestinian territories occupied since 1967."

She has repeatedly accused Israel of committing genocide in Gaza, allegations Israel has rejected.

The United States had placed Albanese under sanctions in July 2025 under an executive order targeting people accused of assisting International Criminal Court actions against the United States or its allies.

"The United States has repeatedly condemned and objected to the biased and malicious activities of Albanese that have long made her unfit for service as a Special Rapporteur. Albanese has spewed unabashed antisemitism, expressed support for terrorism, and open contempt for the United States, Israel, and the West," U.S. Secretary of State Marco Rubio wrote at the time.

The sanctions barred U.S. persons from doing business with her and blocked any property or interests in property under U.S. jurisdiction.

Albanese has denied any allegations of anti-Semitism.

Albanese's husband and daughter, who is a U.S. citizen, sued the Trump administration in February this year, alleging that the U.S. sanctions are "effectively debanking her and making it nearly impossible to meet the needs of her daily life."

In October 2024, Albanese published a U.N. report titled "Genocide as colonial erasure," in which she argued that Israel's campaign in Gaza should be viewed within a broader "settler-colonial" framework.

"Since its establishment, Israel has treated the occupied people as a hated encumbrance and threat to be eradicated, subjecting millions of Palestinians, for generations, to everyday indignities, mass killing, mass incarceration, forced displacement, racial segregation, and apartheid. Advancing its goal of 'Greater Israel' threatens to erase the Indigenous Palestinian population," she wrote.

The "settler-colonial" framework is often associated with left-wing, postcolonial, and critical-theory scholarship.

Australian free-market think tank Institute of Public Affairs (IPA) explicitly calls settler-colonial theory an "unsettling Marxist ideology" as the academic field was founded by British-born prominent social anthropologist and historian Patrick Wolfe, who drew on Marxist theory.

In 2024, a United Nations watchdog called for an immediate probe into alleged ethical abuses by Albanese, which said that she had allegedly requested payments for work done in her official capacity, something it called illegal.

U.N. Watch filed a complaint with U.N. Secretary-General Antonio Guterres and High Commissioner for Human Rights Volker Turk, demanding that Albanese be removed from her role.

In a March 2025 response, the U.N. Coordination Committee did not remove Albanese or find a formal breach, but said the proposed honorarium arrangement was "inappropriate."

"The Committee was also satisfied by the confirmation from the Special Rapporteur that she has not and will not accept payment or honoraria of any kind for work done in her official U.N. capacity," it said.

In 2025, Israel withdrew from the U.N. Human Rights Council (UNHRC), citing "ongoing and unrelenting institutional bias" against the Jewish state.

Israeli Foreign Minister Gideon Sa'ar, in a social media post announcing the withdrawal, cited U.S. President Donald Trump's decision announced the previous day to pull the United States out of the council.

"Israel joins the United States and will not participate in the UNHRC," Sa'ar wrote.

Trump announced in February 2025 that the United States would withdraw from the Human Rights Council and also would not resume funding of UNRWA, the U.N. agency that addresses Palestinians and is the largest employer in the Gaza Strip.

The United States previously froze payments to UNRWA in 2018, during Trump's first term. They were restored under the Biden administration but stopped again after it was alleged that at least 12 agency employees participated in terrorist group Hamas's Oct. 7, 2023, attack on Israel.

Hillel Neuer, executive director of U.N. Watch, told a House Foreign Affairs committee in January 2024 that 1,200 of UNRWA's 13,000 Gaza employees belonged to Hamas and that 6,000 of them had family members in it.

Reuters, Dan M. Berger, and Aldgra Fredly contributed to this report.