Richard Falk, international law scholar and former  UN Special Rapporteur on the Situation of Human Rights in the Palestinian Territories Since 1967, talks about the July 2025 U.S.  sanctions imposed on current Rapporteur  Francesca Albanese. Well known for her  criticism of Israel’s Gaza offensive and her classification of  genocide which now includes wilful mass starvation, Albanese has become the most embattled Special Rapporteur to date.  Falk himself was no stranger to such  pressures during his own 2008-2014 tenure.

Albanese has built her work upon previous rapporteurs while expanding legal findings around the topics of  genocide, state violence, and settler colonialism. For instance, Falk’s predecessor  John Dugard (2001-2008) was the South African jurist who first raised the apartheid context. Succeeding Falk was  Michael Lynk (2016-2022), the Canadian academic who formally advanced the legal case that Israeli policies fell under apartheid.  Falk describes Albanese’s U.S. sanctions and  smear campaigns, and reflects on the risks of advancing  international awareness in the face of significant geopolitical obstacles.

Daniel Falcone: How do you see  Francesca Albanese building upon the work you did as Special Rapporteur on the occupied Palestinian territories and what was the purpose of her  sanctioning?

Richard Falk: Partly due to the context of Israel’s increasingly controversial approach to retaliating against Hamas after its 2023 attacks on a series of Israeli border villages and seizure of an estimated 250 hostages, independent and trustworthy widely available  reporting on the developments in Gaza during the more than 21 months that followed was scarce to the point of absence. The rare reliable reportage turned out to be an invaluable resource superbly brought to the publics of the world in the six reports of  Francesca Albanese in her unpaid role as  UN Special Rapporteur on the Palestinian Territories of Gaza, West Bank, and East Jerusalem occupied since 1967.

To my knowledge, never have the reports and activities of any of the  58 special rapporteurs received the attention, positive and negative as those of  Albanese. Particularly, her courageous naming of the indiscriminate and disproportionate violence by Israel against the people and their vital civilian infrastructure as [ genocidal intent], backed by first-class scholarly analysis and documentation has captured the public imagination of those opposed to Israel’s extreme military operation while simultaneously enraging the complicit government supporters of Israel and their civil society Zionist well-organised allies.

Prior Palestinian SRs have also been on the receiving end of defamatory attacks by Israel and its global NGO network of apologists, starting mildly with  John Dugard, a distinguished anti-apartheid jurist from South Africa and continuing with far harsher criticism of  Michael Lynk, my successor in the years 2014-2022 and  Albanese’s predecessor. I think any objective appraisal of our four performance records would agree that we tried to report truthfully within the scope of the  UN Mandate and were not in any way........

© Pearls and Irritations