Francesca Albanese

Francesca Albanese (born 1977, Italian) is a legal scholar and human rights expert who was appointed UN Special Rapporteur on the situation of human rights in the Palestinian territories occupied since 1967 on 1 May 2022 for a three-year term, and was confirmed for another three years in April 2025. Her June 2025 report, 'From economy of occupation to economy of genocide', listed 48 corporations, including Microsoft, Alphabet and Amazon, which it said were helping Israel displace Palestinians in breach of international law. In July 2025 the U.S. Treasury sanctioned her under Executive Order 14203, and Secretary of State Marco Rubio said her campaign against the US and Israel would no longer be tolerated. In the linked stories she appears as the sanctioned UN expert in a social-media post comparing her case with the lifting of a $10 million U.S. bounty on Syria's Ahmed al-Sharaa, and as a UN source cited in stories about companies and investors tied to Israel's military operations.