The U.S. Denounces Her. Multinationals Threaten Her. She Likes Her Odds.
Oct. 16, 2025
By M. Gessen
Opinion Columnist
Ariano Irpino, Italy — Francesca Albanese can’t buy a cup of coffee in her hometown. Every time she walks into a cafe, someone rushes to pay her check. Thirty years ago, when she graduated from high school, she couldn’t wait to move away. Today, drivers stop to reach out their hands to greet her. A homemade banner hung on a highway overpass says “Grazie, Francesca!”
Albanese became a hometown hero after the White House branded her an enemy, which it did because of her work, over the past three years, as the United Nations special rapporteur for the occupied Palestinian territories. In the course of that work, she has pursued strategies that are as legally ambitious as they are politically risky. She has documented human rights abuses, as her predecessors did. She infuriated some of her allies by condemning the Hamas violence of Oct. 7, 2023, then caused a storm when she leaped onto social media to contest a boilerplate statement by the president of France that framed the violence as antisemitic. Perhaps most explosively, she has called out the corporations, including some of the largest in the United States, that enable and benefit from human rights abuses, and which are likely to continue to do so, regardless of the cease-fire.
In July, Secretary of State Marco Rubio announced that he was imposing sanctions on her. She became a “specially designated national,” a status generally reserved for arms and drug smugglers, terrorists, and oligarchs who have funded them. People on the list cannot travel to the United States. They lose access to any assets they may have in the country, cannot do business with U.S. companies and can’t use U.S. currency — which means that they cannot engage in most international financial transactions.
Under President Trump, sanctions have been used to target.....
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