Dismissing October 7 gang rape and comparing Israel to the Third Reich: Who is UN ‘Special Rapporteur’ Francesca Albanese?

The UN’s independent expert for Palestinian human rights has expressed doubt about the findings of a landmark UN report which found evidence of Hamas’s sexual violence committed on October 7.

It’s the latest example in a long chain of remarks made by UN Special Rapporteur Francesca Albanese, which have led to the accusation that she exhibits anti-Israel bias in a role where she should be impartial.

Albanese was appointed for the role in 2022 by the United Nations Human Rights Council, to follow and report on the human rights situation in the Occupied Palestinian Territory.

Appearing on an episode of Piers Morgan Uncensored this week, Albanese shed doubt on the conclusions of the report by a senior UN official published in March, which found “reasonable grounds to believe” that Hamas committed conflict-related sexual violence — including rape and gang-rape — occurred across multiple locations of Israel and the Gaza periphery during October 7.

Referencing the writer of the report, Albanese described dissmissively how “the Special Representative of the Secretary General went to Israel, didn’t interview any victims, [and] made very controversial statements”.

Albanese has previously denied the allegation that Hamas committed rape as part of its October 7 onslaught. In a tweet from October 11, she said the allegations had not been confirmed, and only served to “escalate tensions and endanger lives in a volative [sic] context”.

When pushed by Morgan on whether she now agreed rape, including gang rape, occurred on October 7 — as was revealed by a UN team in March — Albanese responded: “I prefer to rely on the two reports issued this year by the commission of inquiry.”

“I respect [the Special Representative who authored the first report], but at the same time. I respect the findings of a fact-finding body, whose job is to collect evidence,” she said, referring to a separate UN inquiry in June.

“The commission of inquiry concluded in June that there was no evidence to support the claims of gang rape.”

Albanese went on: “So let’s assume that rape occurred, so? Does it justify what Israel has done?”

“My question is what purpose does it serve?” she said, arguing that discussing Hamas’ violence on October 7 only builds a picture of the “barbarism of the Palestinians”.

In contrast, her tweet from October 11, shedding doubt on the rape, was an attempt to “diffuse the tension”.

She went on reference “the rape that is documented against hundreds of Palestinians in Israeli jail”, asking Morgan: “Can we talk about that… because we have evidence of this.”

Background:

Albanese has been accused on several occasions of exhibiting anti-Israel bias in her role by the UN Watch, a non-governmental watchdog which monitors the organisation’s performance “by the yardstick of its own Charter”.

The UN’s Human Rights Council code of conduct for mandate holders states that they must be guided by the principles of “transparency, impartiality, and even-handedness”, and act with “integrity, meaning, in particular, though not exclusively, probity, impartiality, equity, honesty and good faith”.

According to the UN Watch, Albanese has failed on many occasions to uphold the Code of Conduct, causing the watchdog to campaign for her to be sanctioned and removed from the UN.

On October 7, Albanese sought to justify Hamas’s attack on southern Israel, that saw more than 1,200 killed and over 250 taken hostage in Gaza.

On X/Twitter, she wrote: “Today’s violence must be put in context. Almost six decades of hostile military rule over an entire civilian population (incomprehensibly ignored by too many official statements & media outlets) are in themselves an aggression, and the recipe for more insecurity for all.”

In March, Albanese published a report on the “the situation of human rights in the Palestinian territories occupied since 1967”, entitled “Anatomy of a Genocide”.

In the report, she argued that there are “reasonable grounds to believe” that Israel has committed acts of genocide in Gaza.

Despite the report being about the war, Albanese did not include any discussion of the events committed by Hamas on October 7 which led to it, because “they are beyond the geographic scope of her mandate”.

In response, Israel’s ambassador to the UN in Geneva, Meirav Eilon Shahar, dismissed the report as “an obscene inversion of reality” and “an outrageous distortion of the Genocide Convention”.

Francesca Albanese speaking at a session of the UN Human Rights Council in Geneva in March. (Getty)

Her genocidal accusations against Israel can be traced to as early as 2014, when she shared an article entitled “Incremental genocide” on her X/Twitter.

In 2021, Albanese drew a comparison between Israel’s actions and the Holocaust.

Speaking in a talk, she said: “Just as tragic, terrible, unspeakable, is the tragedy that befell the Jewish people with the Shoah, so for the Palestinians, the Nakba represents the crumbling of the connective tissue of a people”.

That was not the last time she would draw the comparison between Israelis and Nazis, which is designated as an act of antisemitism in the IHRA definition.

In December 2023, she tweeted: “Fellow Europeans, Italians, Germans: after the Holocaust, we should instinctively know that Genocide starts with dehumanizing the Other.

“If Israel’s current attack agst [sic] Palestinians doesnt prompt our strong reaction, the darkest page of our recent history has taught us nothing.”

In 2014, in an open-letter published on her Facebook during the Israeli military operation in Gaza, Albanese accused American opinion on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict of being “subjugated by the Jewish lobby”.

“America and Europe, one of them subjugated by the Jewish lobby, and the other by the sense of guilt about the Holocaust, remain on the sidelines and continue to condemn the oppressed – the Palestinians – who defend themselves with the only means they have (deranged missiles), instead of making Israel face its international law responsibilities,” she wrote.

Albanese has since apologised for using phrase. Speaking to Morgan this week, she said she was “was absolutely wrong” for using the term and has since “distanced” herself from it, ever since she learnt “how people, especially Jewish people, feel offended” by it. 

Francesca Albanese holds her laptop prior to delivering her rapport during a session of the UN Human Rights Council in Geneva in March. (Getty)

In July 2024, Albanese compared Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu with Adolf Hitler, drawing criticism a USA ambassador.

Responding to a post on social media by an anti-Israel, former U.N. human rights administrator, Craig Mokhiber, who wrote that “history is always watching” alongside photos of crowds celebrating the Nazi leader and Israeli prime minister, Albanese wrote: “This is precisely what I was thinking today.”

In response to Albanese’s comparison, Linda Thomas-Greenfield, the USA ambassador to the United Nations, wrote “there is no place for antisemitism from U.N.-affiliated officials tasked with promoting human rights.”

He added: “While the United States has never supported Francesca Albanese’s mandate, it is clear she is not fit for this or any position at the U.N.”

In February, Albanese received condemnation from France and Germany when she rebutted the statement of French President Macron that October 7th constituted the greatest antisemitic massacre of our century.

Writing on X/Twitter in response to his statement, Albanese said: “The ‘greatest anti-Semitic massacre of our century’? No, Mr.@EmmanuelMacron The victims of 7/10 were not killed because of their Judaism, but in reaction to Israel’s oppression.”

The German Foreign Office criticised Albanese’s comment, saying: “To justify the horrific terror attacks of 7/10 & deny their antisemitic nature is appalling. Making such statements in a UN capacity is a disgrace and goes against everything the United Nations stand for.”

Meanwhile, the French Ministry for Europe and Foreign Affairs called her remarks “scandalous”.

Francesca Albanese, the United Nations special rapporteur on Palestinian rights, speaks at a public hearing in Portuguese Parliament on Oct. 3, 2024, in Lisbon, Portugal. Photo by Horacio Villalobos/Corbis via Getty Images)

She drew more criticism, including from the World Jewish Congress (WJC) the American Jewish Committee (AJC) and the Anti-Defamation League (ADL) when she compared Israel with the Third Reich and its “pure race” laws in October.

American diplomat Michèle Taylor accused Albanese of being “unfit for any role at the UN” in response, saying: “The U.S. has never supported her mandate, and her conduct is unacceptable.”

Despite the UN Code of Conduct stating that mandate holders must be impartial, Albanese has admitted that she struggles with this.

“I feared [that] embarking on research on a matter which I had deeply held personal views could compromise my objectivity,” she said in a 2021 lecture.

UN Watch has accused of Albanese of fundamentally failing in her duty to uphold impartiality, due to her long-standing strance that the state of Israel is a colonial state.

Her political stance in evident in the fact that she was a listed speaker at the Palestine Center Annual Conference in 2022, entitled “75 Years of Partition: Ethnic Cleansing and Dispossession”.

Francesca Albanese, U.N. special rapporteur, briefs reporters at U.N. headquarters (Loey Felipe/U.N. Photo/JNS)

Albanese has spoken about how she finds the very existence of the Jewish homeland illegitimate.

In an interview with the Palestine Chronicle in 2021, Albanese said Israel was “in long-standing breach of the basic principles of international law, which started 70 years ago with the forced depopulation of two-thirds of the indigenous Arab population in what became the State of Israel in British Mandate Palestine”.

When questioned by a reporter in November if she believed Israel had a right to exist, Albanese said “there is no such thing in international law, like a right of a state to exist”.

But she clarified that “Israel does exist”, adding that the country is a “recognised member of the United Nations”. 

Albanese recently argued that the UN should consider banning Israel as a member state due to its continuing “genocide”. “It is time to consider suspending the credentials of Israel as a member state of the UN,” she said, speaking to a UN committee on the “inalienable rights of the Palestinian people” in New York on October 31.

But as she visited America, she faced renewed calls to step down and was barred from holding a briefing at the US Congress, with ambassador Thomas-Greenfield writing on X/Twitter: “As UN Special Rapporteur Albanese visits New York, I want to reiterate the US belief she is unfit for her role.”

The JC approached Francesca Albanese for comment.

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