The life of Italian legal scholar Francesca Albanese, who has been the U.N. special rapporteur on the Occupied Palestinian Territories since 2022, began to change this summer on the day she presented her report From the Economy of Occupation to the Economy of Genocide, in which she accused major corporations of being complicit in Israel’s offensive in Gaza.

She had already received threats after her March report,Anatomy of a Genocide, but this time it was different. Six days later, on July 9, U.S. Secretary of State Marco Rubio announced that the sanctions imposed in February on judges and prosecutors of the International Criminal Court (ICC) for issuing arrest warrants against Benjamin Netanyahu and his defense minister, Yoav Gallant, would also be applied to her. The accusation against Albanese was precisely that she had cooperated with the ICC and posed “a threat to the global economy.”

Albanese, 48, was already known as one of the clearest and most forceful voices denouncing human rights violations in Gaza, but she was not widely known among the general public in Italy. From that moment on, coinciding with the launch of the Global Sumud humanitarian flotilla — which received broad support in the country — she began to gain widespread popularity. She appeared daily on television and at public events, but at the same time her private life became unbearable.

Her visa was revoked, and she is barred from entering the United States — for example, she cannot go to the U.N. to present one of her two annual reports; the other is delivered in Geneva. Above all, all her assets were frozen, including her bank account and her apartment in the United States, even though she now lives in Tunisia.

In addition, she was placed on a blacklist that effectively cuts her off from the entire international banking system, as if she were a terrorist or a drug trafficker. Penalties were also established for any U.S. citizen who engages in financial or in-kind transactions with her — including, for example, her husband, who works at the World Bank, and her daughter. “In theory, they can’t even invite me for a coffee, because they could be fined up to $1 billion or face up to 20 years in prison,” she explained in September before the Italian Chamber of Deputies, a point she has repeated in interviews.

EL PAÍS contacted Albanese to ask about her day-to-day life, but after months of intense media exposure, she replied that she needed to take a pause to breathe and spend time with her family. When she spoke in the Italian Chamber of Deputies, it was at an event organized by the opposition to urge the Italian government and the EU to intervene on her behalf, but so far no one has taken action. The government of far-right leader Giorgia Meloni — the European leader closest to Donald Trump — is not particularly sympathetic to her cause.

Albanese has become a leading figure on the left, though an increasingly uncomfortable one, because she calls for drastic measures against Israel. Her constant public appearances have taken a toll. She has had missteps and made controversial statements — some of which she later apologized for — drawing criticism from across the political spectrum. For example, last month, after pro-Palestinian protesters stormed the newsroom of the daily La Stampa, she condemned the action but added that it should serve as a “warning” to journalists about how they do their work. She has also clashed with Senator-for-life Liliana Segre, 95, a Holocaust survivor and a towering figure in Italy, after Segre criticized the use of the term “genocide” to describe the situation in Gaza.

Setting aside these missteps, the fact is that for Italy’s right wing, she has become a symbol to be taken down. She has been the target of personal attacks by Meloni, and last week the education minister, Giuseppe Valditara, sent inspection teams to four schools where Albanese had given talks, to check whether she attempted to indoctrinate students.

“Nobody feels safe”

But that is now the least of her problems. The U.S. sanctions have had sweeping consequences for Albanese. She has to live solely with cash: she cannot receive transfers or donations, collect her salary, or even buy a plane ticket online. “The ice around me has broken,” she explained. “In the United States I used to collaborate with universities, professors, NGOs… but now no one dares to have any relationship with me. Not because they don’t support me, but because at this moment the U.S. administration poses such a threat to everyone that no one feels safe.”

She cannot open a bank account anywhere in the world or have a credit card, because she has been placed on the Office of Foreign Assets Control (OFAC) list of the U.S. Treasury Department, which targets money laundering and terrorism. That department prohibits any financial institution from having someone on the list as a client. Any bank that does so cannot operate in dollars, faces multimillion-dollar fines, and is cut off from international payment systems.

“She called us to see if it would be possible to open an account with us, but we looked at the law and we couldn’t do it — we would be risking our ability to operate,” said Nazzareno Gabrielli, CEO of Banca Etica, an institution dedicated to supporting charitable and social causes. “It saddens us deeply, because this is the result of a completely arbitrary sanction from one state that affects other countries,” he told EL PAÍS. Banca Etica, Amnesty International, and other organizations have written to the Italian government asking it to intervene.

In sanctioning Albanese, the United States is violating U.N. rules that guarantee the immunity of the organization’s officials. But disregarding White House regulations is no joke, as several European banks know. According to the Italian press, in 2019 the Italian bank Unicredit agreed to pay $1.3 billion to the U.S. Treasury Department for conducting transactions with countries under embargo.

The truth is that the European Union would have every right to refuse the enforcement of another country’s law on its territory. Domenico Gallo, former magistrate of the Italian Supreme Court, explained that in response to the problems posed by White House sanctions on countries such as Cuba, Libya, or Iran, the EU had already approved in 1996 the so-called “blocking regulation,” which addresses the extraterritorial effects of third-country measures. It was last updated in 2008.

“The EU can order member states to disobey U.S. sanctions. When the sanctions against the ICC were announced, Ursula von der Leyen, Kaja Kallas, and António Costa criticized them... but only in words; they haven’t reacted since. It’s an international scandal,” said Gallo. In his view, these measures have no legal basis; they simply distort the original purpose of the regulations to target foreign citizens for political persecution.

The decision by the White House has also been deemed illegal by 79 of the 125 countries that signed the Rome Statute, which established the ICC. Within the EU, three did not take a stand: Italy, Hungary, and the Czech Republic. Gallo also cited a legal precedent: in 2002, a person whose assets were frozen by the U.S. challenged the situation before the European Court of Justice (ECJ). This is the famous Kadi case, named after Saudi citizen Yassin Abdullah Kadi, for whom a 2013 European ruling sided with him. The judges found that his right to due process and defense had been violated, since these measures were applied without prior trial. In other words, Francesca Albanese and the other individuals sanctioned by the U.S. could turn to European courts if the EU continues to do nothing.

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