U.N. Watch Executive Director Hillel Neuer on Monday dueled online against U.N. Special Rapporteur for Palestinian Human Rights Francesca Albanese over the latter’s expensive junket to Australia to attend an Israel-bashing conference on November 11.
U.N. Watch has accused Albanese of accepting funding from Palestinian extremist groups in Australia to pay for the trip.
Neuer wrote a letter to U.N. Secretary-General Antonio Guterres last week, saying his organization is “deeply concerned over gross violations of UN rules and basic professional ethics” by Albanese. Specifically, Neuer said “known Palestinian lobby groups” in Australia paid for Albanese’s trip, during which she “repeatedly echoed the Hamas narrative.”
Neuer pointed out to Guterres that U.N. special rapporteurs are supposed to be impartial, and they certainly are not supposed to be cheerleaders for violent terrorist organizations. The U.N. Code of Conduct specifically forbids rapporteurs like Albanese from accepting any “favor, gift, or remuneration” from non-governmental sources.
Neuer said Albanese’s violations of the U.N. ethics code came on top of her “disgraceful antisemitism and support for terrorism,” including her comparing Israelis to Nazis, claiming America has been “subjugated by the Jewish lobby,” and telling Hamas she supports its “right to resist.”
During her trip to Australia, Albanese said Israel’s right to self-defense is “non-existent,” so it should have accepted the unspeakable Hamas atrocities of October 7 — in which over 1,200 Israeli civilians were raped, murdered, tortured, mutilated, and kidnapped — with nothing more than a “law and order” investigation into the perpetrators.
“Israel cannot claim the right of self-defense against a threat that emanates from a territory it occupies, from a territory that is under belligerent occupation,” she said. Later in her remarks, she claimed she was perplexed at the very meaning of “Israel’s right to self-defense,” as though the concept were utterly nonsensical.
Albanese accused the international community of being “almost completely paralyzed” while Israel threatens to “commit the crime of genocide against the Palestinian people.”
“I am being generous when I say the U.N. is experiencing its most epic political and humanitarian failure since its creation,” she said, by which she meant the U.N. was letting the Palestinians down, not the Israelis butchered by Hamas.
Albanese has refused to apologize for calling Israel an “apartheid” state, a slur that refers to the racist system once enforced by South Africa. In July, she called on the International Criminal Court (ICC) to prosecute Israel for committing apartheid crimes.
Australian Jewish organizations were astonished that the U.N. would employ a rapporteur like Albanese after the remarks she made during her trip.
Peter Wertheim, co-chief executive of the Executive Council of Australian Jewry, said it is a “beggars belief” that a U.N. official would deny Israel’s “inherent right to defend itself and its people against armed attacks of the savagery and scale of those carried out by Hamas on October 7.”
“Her bizarre claim that Israelis have no right to defend themselves is as spurious as the array of legal epithets she habitually directs at Israel without even the pretense of an impartial testing of the facts,” Wertheim said.
On Monday, Albanese denied U.N. Watch’s allegations that she violated the U.N. Code of Ethics by accepting funds from Palestinian lobbying groups for her Australia junket.
“Some media are so obsessed with smearing critics of Israeli occupation that they relay info from tainted sources without the bare minimum of due diligence,” she sneered.
Neuer shot back that a Palestinian lobbying group, the Australian Friends of Palestine, has publicly stated it “sponsored” her Australia trip.
“There is something fishy about this visit to Australia,” Neuer continued. “Never in history has the U.N. funded a rapporteur to fly across the world — to a region completely outside their mandate — for a lecture.”
“Never in the history of the U.N. has a so-called independent expert been funded by the U.N. to fly to a country as “the guest of” a partisan lobby — in a country unrelated to the expert’s mandate — to conduct lectures and media tours for that lobby,” he noted.
“The Australian Friends of Palestine Association solicited donations specifically to fund their lobbying, for which they highlight the Edward Said lecture and the Press Club — both done by Francesca Albanese in this visit which they said they sponsored,” he said.
“If Francesca Albanese won’t release her travel receipts, we’re calling on U.N. Secretary-General Antonio Guterres to do so,” Neuer said.
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