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UN Special Rapporteur Francesca Albanese and the urgency of empathy in the face of injustice

What makes Albanese different from the mostly timid career UN officials is that the conclusions she has drawn in her reports cannot be conveyed in polite diplomat-speak. She’s outspoken, angry, urgent, demanding. But she’s not an anti-semite. She is a person who, at a definitive moment in human society, has risen to the occasion.
Mark Heywood
By Mark Heywood
4 Nov 2025
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Recently I had the privilege of interviewing UN Special Rapporteur Francesca Albanese, on the eve of the annual Nelson Mandela Foundation Lecture. The interview was published here:

Exclusive interview: ‘Activists are the antibodies of a healthy society’ — UN’s Francesca Albanese

It was a hasty interview, squeezed between her meeting with Boycott, Disinvestment, Sanctions (BDS) activists and the launch of the Palestinian displacement exhibition in the foundation’s foyer. Yet the depth of what was said in those 15 minutes far exceeded its temporal time.

By her own admission Albanese is forthright. But she did not start life that way. She says she was always a fighter, but: “Now that I have kids, I’m stronger because I am seriously concerned about the world we live in.” 

For most of her career she worked out of the public eye, as do many of us, quietly advancing refugee and other human rights. But the violent reponse to the findings in her official reports on Palestine and the genocide in Gaza — she is the first individual human rights activist and UN office holder to be sanctioned by the US — have forced her to develop a loud voice… and a thick skin.

But despite the violence directed against her, and most importantly the Palestinian people, what she spoke to me about was based on solidarity, love and all that we have in common as human beings. What bell hooks call “radical love” and others call “radical empathy”.

Beneath the staunch human rights defender, I could feel the human. 

Albanese’s outspokenness on the genocide, simply joining dots that she did not make, (actually just fulfilling her role as a UN Special Rapporteur), does not come from a partisan ideological position. Instead it is rooted in law and human rights, something that humanity placed at the centre of all human society when, in 1948, the United Nations adopted the Universal Declaration of Human Rights.

In theory, a “never again” moment. In practice, to be repeated within years in Korea. 

However, what makes Albanese different from the mostly timid career UN officials, and unfortunately even many in human rights organisations, is that the conclusions she has drawn in her reports cannot be conveyed in polite diplomat-speak. 

Read her latest report: Gaza Genocide: a collective crime – Report of the Special Rapporteur on the situation of human rights in the Palestinian territories occupied since 1967

There’s no sugarcoating mass murder or the wanton brutality of any genocide. How can the language of exposé and denunciation not be followed by calls to the world to take action against the offender?

The fact that Albanese refuses to be polite is therefore a challenge to all of us — not just to Israel and Zionism. 

Any genocide is an abomination. The Palestian genocide differs in one sense from the Nazi Holocaust, which also had its enablers. The world only awoke to the full scale of the Holocaust after Germany was defeated in World War 2. Until the discovery of concentration camps like Majdanek, Dachau and Auschwitz in 1944 and 1945 many people could, with justification, claim ignorance.

By contrast, whatever your religion, your political persuasion, today nobody who has a television, radio or access to the internet can claim ignorance of the genocide being perpetrated by the chief genocidaire Netanyahu and the members of the Israeli Defence Force. Nor should any one of us be able to find excuses to justify or excuse it. 

Yet too many of us do. 

Once upon time, the people we celebrate like Nelson Mandela regarded other human lives and dignity as sufficiently important to risk their own life and freedom for. Today we are humans of a lesser nobility. Many of us are on a slippery slope, where convenience and fear of disturbing our own peace and material security robs us of critical thinking and action.

This way societal disintegration lies.

The implication is not only bad for Palestinians, but for the future of human society. Seventy-three years ago in Waiting for Godot, a play that asks deep questions about the essence and measure of our humanity, Samuel Beckett penned words that seem apposite today: “... to all mankind they were addressed, those cries for help still ringing in our ears! But at this place, at this moment in time, all mankind is us, whether we like it or not. Let us make the most of it, before it is too late!”

Recovering compassion 

In my interview, Albanese commented that “if this were a crime scene all our fingerprints would be found on it”.  

True. But it’s worse than that.  

Our inaction, our omission, points to the fact that on all great issues of truth and justice we risk becoming sheep, willing to surrender critical thought to follow our tribe, our ethnic group, our faith, our ideology. 

Yet before we are black or white, Jewish, Christian or Muslim, left or right, we are humans, a species heavily dependent on each other, and the planet we live on. By taking a stand it is our humanity that we stand to recover. 

With truth comes our ability to love in an unselfish way, our ability to exercise our senses to their full, our existentialness. 

So, in conclusion, pardon me if Francesca Albanese is not the shrinking violet you would like her to be. She’s outspoken, angry, urgent, demanding. But she’s not an anti-semite. She is a person who, at another definitive moment in human society, has risen to the occasion. Rather than responding to her by taking “sides”, we should look more deeply at the underlying issues she is raising, read her reports before we open our mouths, and then decide where we stand. 

There is a saying that “We are not our thoughts”. Neither are we our religions, races, beliefs, possessions. We are humans. DM