For a few days in May 2026, Francesca Albanese could live more easily. On 13 May, a US federal judge ruled that sanctions the Trump administration had imposed on her violated her right to free expression, and the government was forced to remove the United Nations (UN) Special Rapporteur on the Occupied Palestinian Territories from its sanctions list. But the reprieve lasted barely a week. On 27 May, after an appeals court suspended the ruling, the US Treasury restored sanctions.

The sanctions have been punishing. Due to the dominant role US institutions play in international financial transactions, Albanese can no longer use credit and debit cards. Her apartment in Washington DC has been seized, while Georgetown University ended her affiliation as a scholar. Her offence is to call out Israel’s genocide in Gaza and the apartheid policies that preceded it.

The whiplash of victory and reversal is part of a wider story. Democratic states have long used sanctions against dictators, terrorists and human rights abusers, but now the Trump administration is increasingly using them as a weapon against people who defend human rights.

Special Rapporteur in the spotlight

Albanese is one of many independent human rights experts, collectively known as the special procedures, with a mandate to report to the UN Human Rights Council on particular countries or themes. There are currently 46 thematic and 13 country mandates. These roles – comprising Independent Experts, Special Rapporteurs and Working Group members – are voluntary and unpaid, serving terms of up to six years. The mandates play a key role in keeping important human rights issues on the international agenda, documenting violations and holding states to account. For civil society they serve as vital points for access and engagement with the UN human rights system, and civil society evidence and recommendations inform the reports officeholders submit.

An Italian citizen with a legal background, Albanese was appointed in 2022 and began her second and final term in 2025. She has been consistently critical of Israel’s occupation of Palestinian territories. In 2024, she presented her Anatomy of a Genocide report to the Human Rights Council. The report found reasonable grounds to conclude that Israel was committing genocidal acts in Gaza, and called for an arms embargo. Her 2025 report, From Economy of Occupation to Economy of Genocide, set out the complicity of major companies, including Amazon, Microsoft and Palantir among many others, in Israel’s genocide in Gaza and violence against Palestinians on the West Bank.

Albanese’s demands for justice have brought a fierce backlash from Israel and its allies. Israel called for her to be removed from her post and banned her from visiting Israel and Palestine. The Trump administration followed suit in calling for her dismissal. In response to her 2025 report, it accused her of ‘political and economic warfare, which threatens our national interests and sovereignty’. When it imposed sanctions on Albanese last July, it was the first time these had been applied against a UN independent human rights expert.

Sanctions politicised

Albanese isn’t the only target. This month, Israel received widespread international condemnation for its actions against the Global Sumud Flotilla, a civil society-led initiative to defy Israel’s chokehold on aid for Gaza and bring vital humanitarian supplies by sea. Israel intercepted the boats in international waters, abducted those on board and subjected them to sickening abuse, including sexual assault, beatings and prolonged spells of restraint using cable ties. When Israel’s far-right national security minister Itamar Ben-Gvir posted a video of himself taunting the abducted activists, democratic states including Canada, Italy and the UK deplored his behaviour, and France and Poland banned him from their countries.

But the US government has done the opposite, imposing sanctions on four activists involved in organising the flotilla. The politicisation of sanctions is evident, given that one of Donald Trump’s first acts on returning to the presidency was to lift sanctions on violent Israeli West Bank settlers.

The International Criminal Court (ICC) is also a target. Last year the Trump administration sanctioned nine ICC officials, including several judges. The measures came after the ICC issued arrest warrants on crimes against humanity and war crimes charges against Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and former Defence Minister Yoav Gallant, and in retaliation for the court’s investigation into potential US war crimes in Afghanistan.

Trump has made attacking the ICC a core plank of his foreign policy, with reports last year that his administration was threatening further sanctions to try to force revisions of the court’s founding treaty, the Rome Statute, to explicitly exclude jurisdiction over non-member states such as the USA. Early in his second presidency, he issued an executive order threatening sanctions against anyone who participates in the ICC’s investigations. This sweeping order enabled the sanctions against Albanese. Trump previously sanctioned two ICC officials in his first term.

Trump has also weaponised sanctions to block climate action. Last year the International Maritime Organization was about to finalise a deal to limit the shipping industry’s greenhouse gas emissions. At the last minute, adoption of the new rules was postponed when Trump threatened to impose sanctions on states that supported the emissions curbs.

Chilling effect

Beyond their immediate effects, sanctions help repressive states smear human rights advocates as criminals and terrorists. For Albanese, sanctions form part of a broader campaign to restrict her right to speak out. She has received death threats, which have also been levelled against her daughter. In 2025, universities in Berlin and Munich cancelled events she was due to speak at following pressure from Israel’s ambassador to Germany, and when the Berlin meeting went ahead at another venue, it was against the backdrop of an intimidating riot police presence. Albanese also says her husband’s career at the World Bank has suffered as a result of her vocal criticism.

A broader chilling effect on civil society is visible. Concern about being penalised for sanctions violations caused two US-based human rights groups to pull out of the ICC’s annual meeting last year. For the Trump administration, sanctions are part of a wider onslaught on the rights of people and institutions to demand justice for Israel’s many human rights violations. These sanctions have come alongside violence against US protests in solidarity with Palestine, deportations of activists and threats to throw young people out of university and defund education institutions. The intent is to silence critics of Israel, starting with Albanese.

The misuse of sanctions also forms part of a broader assault on the institutions and rules of global governance. At the same time that the Trump administration is twisting international norms about how sanctions are used and who they’re applied to, it’s also choosing which organisations to participate in and which rules to follow depending on what it sees as the US national interest, and lashing out at international bodies and processes that bring human rights scrutiny.

Justice deferred

On 13 May, following a case brought by Albanese’s family, District Judge Richard Leon granted an injunction against the sanctions, finding they punished her for constitutionally protected speech. He held that her recommendations to the ICC had no binding effect and were only her opinion. For a moment, the ruling suggested that the Trump administration’s excesses in this sphere could be checked through the courts.

That hope has been disappointed. On 22 May, a three-judge panel of the US Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit stayed Leon’s ruling, and a few days later the Trump administration returned Albanese to the sanctions list. The appeals court stressed that its order was procedural and should not be read as a ruling on the merits of the case, but its practical effect was immediate, and the sanctions will remain in force while the appeal proceeds.

A single ruling, now suspended, was never going to be enough against the Trump administration’s increasing use of sanctions as a tool to try to silence people. The democratic states that condemned Israel’s abuses against the flotilla activists must show the same resolve when the world’s most powerful state turns sanctions against people whose only offence is to insist that human rights apply everywhere, including in Gaza.

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