Francesca Albanese

Francesca Albanese is an international lawyer, specialized in human rights and the Middle East. Since May 2022, she has served as the United Nations Special Rapporteur on the situation of human rights in the Palestinian territory occupied since 1967. An affiliate scholar at the Institute for the Study of International Migration at Georgetown University, Albanese is the author of Palestinian Refugees in International Law (Oxford University Press, 2020, with Lex Takkenberg) and J’Accuse (Fuoriscena, 2024).

Her academic works cover various aspects of the Question of Palestine, the legal situation in Israel/Palestine, and Palestinian forced displacement. Albanese is responsible for the research and legal assistance programme on migration and asylum seekers in the Arab world for the think tank Arab Renaissance for Democracy and Development (ARDD), and is a co-founder of the Global Network on the Question of Palestine (GNQP), a coalition of prominent regional and international experts and scholars engaged in the issue of Israel/Palestine. She
has worked with various international organizations, including the Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights (OHCHR) and the Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees (UNRWA).

As Special Rapporteur, she has published numerous legal opinions and several major reports on violation of the law of self-determination in the oPt (2022), the widespread and systematic mass deprivation of liberty of Palestinians (2023), violated childhood in the oPt (2023), and genocide (2024a, 2024b, 2025).