Courtesy of JNS. Photo credit: Ida Marie Odgaard/Ritzau Scanpix/AFP via Getty Images
Francesca Albanese, a United Nations adviser on the Palestinians, looks on as she holds a press conference in Copenhagen, Denmark on Feb. 5, 2025
(JNS) — In her Nov. 23, 2021 application to become United Nations special rapporteur for Palestinian rights, Francesca Albanese wrote in the “qualifications” section, “I am an international lawyer, with a solid knowledge of international human rights law and international humanitarian law, gained through advanced legal studies and over 17 years of experience, including fieldwork with the United Nations, academia and NGOs.”
Albanese also wrote in the application, for the position that she has held since May 2022, that she is “a human rights lawyer ‘by training and call’” and that it would be an honor to secure the role “as a lawyer, as a woman and as someone unfailingly committed to justice.” She signed her name certifying that “all of the statements made in this application are true, complete and are made in good faith.”
But despite echoing the “international lawyer” description in her official U.N. bio, on her social media account and in her bio at Georgetown University’s School of Foreign Service, where she is an affiliated scholar, she told the Italian edition of Vanity Fair, in an interview published on Tuesday, that she never passed the bar and, thus, hasn’t been licensed to practice law.
A bolded heading in the article, per an automatic Google translation, states that “they also accuse her of calling herself a ‘lawyer’ without having taken the exam to qualify for the profession.”
“I never lie. I didn’t take the exam to become a lawyer, because I’m not a lawyer, and I never wanted to do it,” Albanese told the magazine, per the translation. “I studied law, and almost by chance, I was confused, I had just lost my father. Now I really respect lawyers in Italy who deal with human rights, but 25, 30 years ago, what I wanted to do didn’t exist here.”
“Francesca Albanese has now admitted that she never took a bar exam. Yet for years she publicly referred to herself as an ‘international lawyer,’ a title that implies having license and authority to practice law,” Hillel Neuer, the executive director of U.N. Watch, told JNS.
“In most jurisdictions, including Italy where she lives, and in the United States, where Georgetown University lists her as an affiliate and describes her as an ‘international lawyer,’ calling yourself a lawyer without bar admission is misleading at best and unlawful at worst,” Neuer said.
“As a U.N. official tasked with upholding legal standards, Albanese’s misrepresentation of her credentials raises serious ethical concerns,” he told JNS. “It’s one more example of her utter disregard for facts and accountability.”
In the education section of Albanese’s application to the United Nations, she noted that she holds an LL.M. in “international human rights law” from the School of Oriental and African Studies in London, where she was a full-time student from 2005 to 2006. She also stated that in 2022, she “provided legal counsel to undocumented migrants from Morocco to Italy” via the “Legal Aid CGIL (Workers’ Union).”
Despite telling Vanity Fair that she isn’t a lawyer, Albanese has often called herself a lawyer in her social media interactions with others. “Feel free to call it the way that makes more sense to your system and conscience. As a lawyer, I am obliged to be precise and scientific,” she wrote in December 2022. “This is also what impartiality, integrity and objectivity entail.”
In April 2022, she wrote to another user that “it is a privilege to have journeyed with you, my precious Noura, for the past 12 years, as a friend, fellow lawyer and fellow mother,” and on April 30, less than a month before the Vanity Fair article ran, she wrote that “I do not hate Israel. As a human rights lawyer, I stand firmly against human rights violations, annexation of territory by force, apartheid and other crimes.”
Riccardo Puglisi, a professor of public economics at the University of Pavia, in Italy, told JNS that he had long been suspicious of Albanese’s qualifications. (The professor wrote to Neuer in February 2024 about Albanese’s resume, which listed “international lawyer” at the top.)
The professor tried to confirm his suspicions but couldn’t get through the red tape at the legal credentialing body in Milan, where Albanese said she practiced law. The Italian journalist Antonino Monteleone asked Albanese directly about her bar registration and she sent him a copy of her apprenticeship certificate on social media. The certificate detailed her completion of the standard two-year apprenticeship between law school and sitting for the bar exam in Italy.
In the since-deleted public post, according to Puglisi, Albanese told Monteleone that he would hear from her lawyers.
“It’s weird, because if you’re accused of not having passed something, to put the previous step, it’s ridiculous,” Puglisi told JNS. “It is as if I say that I graduated in economics, and I put the fact that I passed the first three exams. It’s silly. That’s what happened.”
JNS sought comment from Albanese’s office, the Office of U.N. Special Procedures and the U.N. Human Rights Office, which appointed her to her role. Albanese is considered an “independent expert” who advises the global body.
Albanese has a long history of antisemitic comments and vilifying Israel. Governments including the United States, France and Germany have denounced her Jew-hatred.
The U.N. Human Rights Council recently renewed Albanese’s mandate, over objections from several countries, for another three-year term.
On April 15, the U.S. mission to the United Nations stated that Washington “continues to strongly denounce Francesca Albanese’s tenure as the ‘U.N. special rapporteur on the situation of human rights in the Palestinian territory occupied since 1967.’”
“The Human Rights Council’s support for Ms. Albanese offers yet another example of why President Trump ordered the United States to cease all participation in the HRC,” the mission stated. “Ms. Albanese’s actions also make clear the United Nations tolerates antisemitic hatred, bias against Israel and the legitimization of terrorism.”
Neuer told JNS that the revelation that Albanese never sat for the bar exam “only strengthens our call on the U.S. Secretary of State Marco Rubio to formally recognize that Albanese no longer holds a valid U.N. mandate.”
He called on Rubio to “declare that she is therefore no longer entitled to any diplomatic immunity” and added that “she should be sanctioned, subject to lawsuits and denied entry to the United States.”
