UN expert on Palestine pushes back ‘false claims’ over Australia trip

By Riyaz ul Khaliq

ISTANBUL (AA) – Amid her advocacy to end bombardment of Gaza, the UN special rapporteur on occupied Palestinian territories has said she is facing “continuous defamation” of her mandate.

“Yet another trail of egregiously false claims agst (against) me. My trip to Australia was paid by the UN as part of my mandate’s activities,” Francesca Albanese wrote on X.

She was responding to a statement by Hillel C. Neuer, the executive director of UN Watch, which claims combat against “anti-Israel bias at the UN.”

Neuer called Albanese a “pro-Hamas UN official” and claimed her Australia trip “was sponsored by known Palestinian lobby groups in that country.”

“Continuous defamation agst (against) my mandate may be well remunerated, but won’t work. It just wastes time that should be used to help stop violence in oPt (occupied Palestine),” retorted Albanese, who has only earned ire from Israel for her work on the occupied Palestinian territories.

According to the UN Human Rights office, Albanese was appointed the special rapporteur on the situation of human rights in the Palestinian territories occupied since 1967 by the Human Rights Council in March 2022.

She has been vocal against the ongoing Israeli aggression in the besieged Palestinian enclave of Gaza and has warned that Israel was seeking to justify what would amount to “ethnic cleansing” in the name of self-defense.

Soon after Israel began its ongoing indiscriminate attacks on Gaza, Albanese told Anadolu last month a significant part of Gaza’s population was being “wiped off.”

“What’s happening is that a significant part of the Palestinian population in Gaza is being wiped off. Not differently from what has happened before … but with increased ferocity," Albanese said.

She was in Australia last week where she spoke about the situation in Gaza. Foreign Minister Penny Wong had declined to meet the visiting UN rapporteur.

Albanese told an event in Canberra that under international law, Israel “cannot claim the right of self-defense against a threat that emanates from the territory it occupies – from a territory that is kept under belligerent occupation.”

A lawyer by training from Italy, Albanese also weighed on the role of the UN that, she said, “experiencing its most epic political and humanitarian failure since its creation.”

“Individual member states, especially in the West and Australia is no exception, are on the margins, muttering inaudible words of condemnation for Israel’s excesses at best – or staying silent in fear of restraining Israel’s self-proclaimed right to self-defense, whatever it means,” she said.

The UN profile of Albanese says she is an affiliate scholar at the Institute for the Study of International Migration at Georgetown University, as well as a senior advisor on migration and forced displacement.

She has widely published on the legal situation in Israel and Palestine, and regularly teaches and lectures on international law and forced displacement at universities in Europe and the Arab region.