The embattled witnesses

The UN’s special rapporteurs are experts charged with a singular mandate: to monitor the world’s worst human rights abuses

by Alvina Hoffmann BIO

Smoke rising following an Israeli strike in the Bureij refugee camp in the centre of the Gaza Strip, on 6 May 2025. Photo by Eyad Baba/AFP/Getty Images

is lecturer in Diplomatic Studies and deputy director of the Center for International Studies and Diplomacy at SOAS University of London, UK.

On 9 July 2025, the government of the United States imposed sanctions on Francesca Albanese, the UN special rapporteur on Palestine. Earlier in the spring, Albanese had written confidential letters to US companies, warning that she would name them in her forthcoming UN report for contributing to gross violations of human rights in Israel’s war in Gaza. The US administration framed these letters as a campaign of political and economic warfare. The sanctions against Albanese, an Italian-born legal scholar and human rights expert, are part of a broader executive order that sanctioned judges and prosecutors of the International Criminal Court. The US secretary of state Marco Rubio cited as the reason her direct engagement with the International Criminal Court ‘in efforts to investigate, arrest, detain, or prosecute nationals of the United States or Israel’. Albanese and the sanctioned ICC staff are now on the US Treasury Department’s Specially Designated Nationals list, alongside suspected terrorists, drug traffickers and arms dealers.

This is the first time the US has sanctioned a UN official, and the first time such a punishment was imposed on a UN special rapporteur for exercising their mandate. As Volker Türk, the UN high commissioner on human rights, stated: ‘UN special rapporteurs … address – by their nature – sensitive and often divisive issues, that are of international concern.’ The sanctioned individuals are banned from entering the territory of the US, have their assets frozen, and are unable to access basic financial services, such as using a credit card in their name or doing online shopping. The travel sanctions also extend to family members. On 14 May 2026, a US federal judge blocked these sanctions, arguing that the Trump administration had violated her free speech rights. Albanese welcomed the decision but said the battle was not over.

Francesca Albanese, the UN special rapporteur on Palestine, at a press conference at the UN’s European headquarters in Geneva, Switzerland, 15 September 2025. Photo by Pierre Albouy/Reuters

The experience of previous UN special rapporteurs on Palestine has shown that this is ‘a demanding, controversial, and sometimes embattled assignment’, as the foreword to the collected edition of Albanese’s reports puts it. The American Richard Falk, a former special rapporteur on Palestine (2008-14) and a professor emeritus of international law at Princeton, was detained during his first trip in 2008, despite UN assurances to assuage his reluctance to travel to Israel from his home in California. Albanese assumed the mandate in 2022, but circumstances changed dramatically after Hamas’s attack on Israel on 7 October 2023 and Israel’s genocidal war against Gaza. Her mandate was renewed for another, final, three-year period in 2025.

But the Palestine mandate is not the only target. With a total of 46 thematic and 13 country mandates – part of what is known in the UN as special procedures, comprising special rapporteurs, independent experts and working groups – other rapporteurs have come under attack for their human rights work too. For example, in early 2018, Victoria Tauli-Corpuz, a member of the Indigenous Kankanaey Igorot people and at the time a UN special rapporteur on the rights of Indigenous peoples, was accused of membership in a terrorist organisation by her own government of the Philippines, then led by Rodrigo Duterte. She was forced to leave the country due to concerns for her safety. The accusation followed public comments she and other special rapporteurs made on the militarisation, attacks and killings of several Indigenous groups from the Philippine island of Mindanao after it was placed under martial law in May 2017.

Much earlier, two International Court of Justice cases in 1989 and 1999 dealt with the independence of UN special rapporteurs. The cases involved two experts and their home countries of Romania and Malaysia, which sought to restrict their ability to exercise their mandates. Both cases clarified that special rapporteurs held privileges and immunities as stipulated in the 1946 UN convention, which protected them from legal proceedings against words spoken in their official capacity during the course of their mission.

Such harsh pushback and attacks against special rapporteurs often heighten public awareness of these independent experts. But who are these people who come to assume such high-profile roles as independent human rights experts at the UN?

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Special rapporteurs are part of a global body of human rights experts who have built a reputation in their particular thematic field, recognised expertise and often networks with other experts, civil society or UN officials. However, what counts as human rights expertise is made up of a selection of professional profiles, resources, skills and education. This means that there can be quite a variety within this collective. For example, over time, the body of experts has been shaped by four broad types of professional profiles, growing from lawyers and state representatives to human rights academics and professionals in human rights advocacy to experts with subject-specific knowledge. Some experts have more knowledge of the UN system than others, acquired through professional or previous expert appointments in the UN or their academic........

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