A US federal judge has put on hold the sanctions the Trump administration imposed on Francesca Albanese, the UN Special Rapporteur on the Palestinian Occupied Territories. The reasoning: the sanctions likely violate the right to free expression under the First Amendment of the US Constitution.

Albanese, an Italian lawyer and expert in international law, was sanctioned in July 2025 for recommending that the International Criminal Court investigate Israeli and US citizens for possible war crimes connected to Israeli military operations in Gaza. Washington's reaction was swift - a US entry ban, frozen bank accounts, a block on financial transactions.

The reaction was so wide-ranging that Albanese physically could not open a bank account. Her husband and her daughter (a US citizen) filed a lawsuit in February. Judge Richard Leon, of the District Court in Washington, accepted their argument on Wednesday: „Albanese has done nothing more than speak! Her recommendations have no binding effect on ICC proceedings, they are nothing more than her opinion."

For those who remember how the International Criminal Court works - that's technically correct. The ICC doesn't take decisions based on the recommendations of UN rapporteurs. It takes them on the basis of gathered evidence, formal procedures, and confirmation from its own judges. A recommendation is inspiration, not command.

But the Trump administration didn't want to „defeat" her through logic - it wanted to shut that down as an option. By sanctioning a single individual, the message goes out to every UN rapporteur: „if you speak against Israel or the US, you won't be able to live a normal life".

For Balkan readers, this is an interesting parallel. The UN rapporteurs who worked on our region in the 1990s were crucial in documenting war crimes. Without them, much of what is being prosecuted today at The Hague would be without documents. What is happening now is the criminalisation of the profession itself. And it's coming from the world's largest democracy, whose own judges are still trying to block it.

Will the UN have rapporteurs for occupied territories in ten years? Maybe. Will they be the same kind of independent experts? No. That's the quiet but important loss of this moment.