France will demand the resignation of UN Special Rapporteur Francesca Albanese during the United Nations Human Rights Council session on February 23, French Foreign Minister Jean-Noël Barrot announced during a parliament meeting earlier this week.
The decision comes as result of Albanese’s antisemitic remarks at Saturday’s Al Jazeera Forum, where she spoke alongside a “representative of Hamas and a representative of the Iranian government while the repression continues.”
Her comments, Barrot said, “target not the Israeli government, whose policies can be criticized, but Israel as a people and as a nation, which is absolutely unacceptable.”
Barrot noted that Albanese’s words “add to a long list of scandalous positions, justifying October 7, the worst antisemitic massacre in our history since the Holocaust, mentioning the ‘Jewish Lobby’ and comparing Israel to the Third Reich.”
“She presents herself as a UN independent expert, yet she is neither an expert nor independent — she is a political activist who stirs up hate speech and undermines the cause of the Palestinian people that she claims to defend.”
French Parliment Member Caroline Yadan further noted in a Thursday post to X/Twitter that herself, alongside fifty other members of Parliment sent a letter to Barrot demanding Albanese be immediately removed from all UN mandates.
Yadan explained that the letter was sent in response to Albanese’s repeated “positions marked by radical rhetoric” which are “incompatible with the requirements of neutrality, impartiality and credibility attached to this mandate.”
“By recently describing Israel as an ‘enemy of humanity’, she has crossed an additional threshold, fitting into rhetoric that constitutes contemporary forms of antisemitism,” Yadan went on, referencing Albanese’s remarks at the Saturday forum.
“This situation cannot continue,” Yadan pressed. “France must work to ensure that sanctions are imposed and that Francesca Albanese is immediately removed from any United Nations mandate.”
Like France, the Combat Antisemitism Movement (CAM) has also called for Albanese’s immediate resignation after calling Israel a “common enemy of humanity” during the forum.
“To declare the world’s only Jewish state a ‘common enemy of humanity’ is not human rights advocacy,” CAM’s Director of European Affairs Shannon Seban wrote in a letter to the president of the UN Human Rights Council. “It is the language of collective demonization, and it echoes some of the darkest chapters in modern history.”
Opposition leader and former prime minister Yair Lapid echoed the French sentiment in his own post to X on Thursday, calling Albanese “an extremist antisemitic envoy working in the service of an organization that has lost its moral core.”
He stressed that should the UN not “fire her immediately, it is an explicit endorsement of antisemitism, and proof that it is time to dismantle the organization.”
UN’s Albanese says humanity has ‘common enemy’ in Israel at forum
Albanese, appearing at the same conference as Hamas leader Khaled Mashaal and Iranian Foreign Minister Abbas Araghchi, spoke during the panel “The Palestinian Cause in a World Moving Toward Multipolarity.”
During the panel, she condemned countries for maintaining relationships and arms trade with the Jewish state and alleged global inaction during the two-year Israel-Hamas War.
“The fact that most of the media in the Western world has been amplifying … the genocidal narrative is a challenge. But at the same time, here also lies the opportunity,” she said. “Because if international law has been stabbed in the heart, it is also true that never before has the global community seen the challenges that we all face.”
She stressed that humanity “now has a common enemy … And the respect for fundamental freedoms is the last peaceful avenue, the last peaceful toolbox that we have to gain our freedom.”
Danielle Greyman-Kennard contributed to this report.