Francesca Albanese, UN Special Rapporteur oPt

Gracias, Presidente, por este reconocimiento, por defender una Europa que pertenezca a sus pueblos, en el respeto del derecho internacional, no por encima ni en contra de él, y por la solidaridad, linfa vital de la familia humana. Palestina libre, y nosotros con ella.

European diplomats and politicians, please remember: there is a genocide ongoing. Ask yourselves what would you do, if we were in 1930. Let's halt the multilateral disorder. Let's work together for a decolonised multilateralism premised upon dignity and human rights -for real.

@Viv_Dany @francofontana43 @CosettaGiordano Qui non si tratta di destra e sinistra. Borsellino era di destra. Granata è di destra. Si può essere di destra e non essere un ignorante spudorato.

@francofontana43 @CosettaGiordano Nessuna meraviglia. Il Corriere è sempre stato di destra. L'unica differenza è che una volta era una destra colta e abbastanza liberale, oggi è sciatta e incolta. La differenza si vede. Un titolo così lo si può trovare tranquillamente su Porro o il Secolo D'Italia o la Verità.

Il Corriere si stupisce per la solidarietà, i premi e gli onori, dalla Spagna alla Francia, conferiti a Francesca Albanese Piuttosto ci si dovrebbe stupire del vergognoso e vile comportamento del nostro governo, della nostra stampa e dell’Unione Europea che da tempo hanno messo sotto attacco la coraggiosa relatrice dell’ONU per i Territori Palestinesi, perseguitata dal regime di Trump e lasciata senza difesa Claudio Bozza, @Corriere

"Pro-pal": che nel 1930, sarebbe suonato come "pro-eb". "Passione per Albanese" e non consapevolezza degli obblighi internazionali alla luce dei fatti che, a questo punto, solo un ottuso assoluto può non vedere. Senza pudore, solo livore e ignoranza.

#WhenTheWorldSleeps Palestine stands as the moral compass of our time. Exposing Apartheid and its crimes, their root causes and implications, is necessary to ensure the world "wake up" and work together to overcome it. Together we can and we will.

Possible title: "If this is a lawyer". *** When Netanyahu will be brought before the Court for his many crimes, many more will remain to be prosecuted. The level of acquiescence and complicity of the entire Israeli institutional apparatus is astounding.

Domani, a Venezia, io ed @weizman_eyal ci incontreremo per denunciare ancora una volta il genocidio in corso in Palestina. Ed intanto: fuori l'Apartheid dalla nostra vita. Mai più complici.

I hear Thiago & Saif will be released. That is great! NOW ALL OF US must keep pressing governments so that Apartheid Israel releases the thousands of Palestinians held in its torture centers. Ahmed joined the advocacy as soon as he was freed.What an example. We missed you Ahmed!

I join UN experts to call on US law-makers to reject the Polisario Front Terrorist Designation Bill, which could infringe the US' duty to respect the right of self-determination of the Sahrawi People of the non-self-governing territory of Western Sahara spcommreports.ohchr.org/TMResultsBase/…

As the world looks elsewhere, Israel continues to exterminate Palestinians in Gaza. Days in days out. Shame on complicit western media and all complicit governments.

@yanisvaroufakis thank you for this kindest words.

IN PRAISE OF FRANCESCA ALBANESE There is a question that visits me in the small hours, when sleep will not come and the mind turns over old stones. The question is this: “What would I have done in the 1930s, on the morning after Kristallnacht?" Not what I say I would have done. Not what I hope I would have done. But what would I actually have done—when the trains began to run, when the neighbours grew quiet, when the cost of decency became the loss of everything? Most of us, I think, would have done little. Not from malice. From fear. From the soft, creeping conviction that someone else will speak, that the situation is complex, that we must be 'reasonable'. Lest we forget, the ordinary is the extraordinary's alibi. And how we have clung to that alibi! How we still cling to it! And then, every once in a terrible while, someone appears who does not cling. Someone who steps forward when others step back. Someone who speaks the name of the thing when everyone else is busy naming something else. Francesca Albanese is that someone. She stands before the world—alone, unarmed, armed only with law and language and a rare courage—and she says what the centrists will not say, what the foreign ministries will not say, what the editorial boards will not say. She says: "This is a genocide. And we are watching it happen." Do not tell me that is hyperbole. Do not tell me the term is contested. She has not used it lightly. She has used it as a physician arrives scientifically at a diagnosis—not to wound, but to warn. Not to inflame, but to name. And for that, they have come for her. Oh, how they have come for her. Smears. Investigations. Vicious editorials. Frozen bank accounts. Dispossession of the only apartment she had ever owned. The machinery of the respectable turned to crush her. Because the respectable cannot abide what she represents: a mirror held up to their complicity. Let us, once again, travel back to the 1930s. Back to the few who stood up when the trains began to run laden with Jewish people. There was Aristides de Sousa Mendes, a Portuguese consul in Bordeaux. He defied his own government. He signed thousands of visas, by hand, for hours, until his fingers bled. He saved more lives than Schindler. And he died penniless, disgraced, erased. There was a German officer in Warsaw named Wilm Hosenfeld. He hid a Jewish pianist in the rubble. He did not save thousands. He saved one. But that one—Władysław Szpilman—carried the memory. And memory is "the only haven from which we cannot be expelled." There was Raoul Wallenberg. There were the villagers of Le Chambon. There were the anonymous, the quiet, the furious few who said: “Not on my watch.” Francesca Albanese is their heir. Not because she carries a gun. Not because she hides refugees in her basement. But because she does something equally dangerous in a world that has perfected the art of not seeing. She sees. And she speaks. She does not speak as a diplomat. Thank Goodness she doesn't! Diplomats have given us the language of "there are arguments on both sides" and "restraint" and "proportionality." Diplomatic language is the perfumed grave of moral clarity. No, she speaks as a jurist. As a human being. As a woman who has looked into the abyss and refused to call it a "complex geopolitical landscape". Edna O'Brien once described a character who "had the recklessness of those who have already lost everything worth losing." Francesca Albanese has not lost everything. She has her dignity, her office, her voice, her family. But she has calculated the cost of speaking truth to power. And she has decided that that cost is infinitely less than the cost of silence. What is that cost? Let us name it. She has been called antisemitic—she, who stands on the ground of international law forged in the ashes of Auschwitz and the fires of Nuremberg. She has been called a conspiracy theorist—she, who cites every source, every footnote, every UN resolution. She has been called naive—she, who understands better than most the machinery of realpolitik. These accusations are not arguments. They are the spittle of the threatened. Because Francesca Albanese threatens something very precious to the powerful: the right to commit atrocity without being named. Friends, the 1930s did not arrive with jackboots and pogroms on day one. They arrived in small increments. With "reasonable" restrictions. With "proportional" measures. With the silence of the respectable. We tell ourselves that we would have been different. That we would have been Sousa Mendes. That we would have been Wallenberg. But most of us, I fear, would have been the neighbours who later said, "I didn't know." Francesca Albanese knows. And she refuses to pretend otherwise. So let us praise her. Not with statues or awards she does not seek. But with something harder: with our own refusal to look away. With our own voices, raised in places that are safe for us but dangerous for her. With our own bodies, if it comes to that. A brave woman, who was injured while demonstrating outside a US nuclear military base in 1982, the infamous Greenham Common, had told me that "the heart is a hunter for what it cannot have." But I say the heart is a hunter for what it will not lose. And what we will not lose is the memory of those who stood up when standing up cost everything. Francesca Albanese is standing up now. In our time. In our name. Under our indifferent sky. Let us stand with her. Not tomorrow. Not when it is safe. Now. [Extract from a speech in Athens on Sunday 3rd May 2026]

Special Rapporteur Ben Soul is one of the most principled and courageous colleagues I have had in the journey as an independent expert of the UN.

@alhaq_org @NimerSultany Yes!

📣 Visa Victory: Al-Haq’s General Director, Shawan Jabarin, Wins Appeal against French Minister of Interior in case of Politically Motivated Visa Denial alhaq.org/advocacy/27616…

De Guernica a Gaza.

Gracias Presidente Sànchez. For your words, for your principled stance, and for trying to steer Europe away from the abyss.

🚨 May 3 is the World Press Freedom Day More than 300 journalists were killed in Gaza since October 2023. UN Special Rapporteur @Irenekhan warned that Israel appears to be following a "deliberate strategy" & the aim is not only to kill journalists but to “kill the story.”

@espressonline E l Italia ha questo.

"Se hai la fortuna che ti fermano per tre o quattro ore e puoi gridare che sei stato torturato è il massimo a cui aspirare", ha detto La Russa sulla Flotilla

Sexual and Gender-based violence to forcibly displace Palestinians dates back to the Nakba. And it continues.

@gbsumudflotilla @TaraAOGrady @thiagoavilabr My deepest condolences to Thiago's family and community.

Teresa Regina de Ávila e Silva, Thiago's mother, passed away in Brasília. We express our deepest condolences to Teresa's family and loved ones. She was 63 years old, a woman of remarkable joy and great strength. She faced years of serious illness with courage, serenity, and dignity, driven by an unwavering will to live and surrounded by the unconditional dedication of her family. Thiago's two-year-old daughter carries her name. Rest in peace, mãecaco. Your story lives on in our struggle.

Francesca Albanese, the UN special rapporteur for the occupied Palestinian Territories, wrote to Stoltenberg in May last year, warning that the fund's ongoing investments in companies implicated in war crimes risked putting Norway in breach of international law middleeasteye.pulse.ly/2qxbduohhc