Mandates of Independence; Mandates of International Law

The current US administration has been very prompt and in absolutely no second thoughts, whenever it has come to imposing sanctions on individual officials working under international legal mandates, who according to it may have expressed antisemitism in their work- be it the few months ago travel ban on the members of the Office of Prosecutor at the International Criminal Court for issuing arrest warrant against Benjamin Netanyahu or the very recent sanctions on the United Nations Special Rapporteur on the Occupied Palestinian Territories Francesca Albanese for coming out with a report titled "From an Economy of Occupation to an Economy of Genocide."

- DR. RADHIKA JAGTAP

This report has drawn larger global attention as very unapologetically it builds a nexus between the ongoing warfare in Gaza and the benefiting multinational business corporations, listing around 48 of them.

In the preceding report of March 2024, Albanese became the first few voices who unequivocally used the terminology of "genocide" for Israel's actions in Gaza, following the December 2023 initiation of proceedings at the International Court of Justice by South African Government against Israel under the Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide of 1948.

There have been several attempts to discredit Albanese's work, and it has been called out as antisemitic. Meanwhile, Michael Fakhri, the U.N. special rapporteur on the right to food, has commented that Israel's 78-day-long extreme blockade of Gaza constitutes "the fastest starvation campaign we've seen in modern history." Fakhri also mentioned that the mass suffering has been both "preventable" and "predictable".