"The Litmus Test of Palestine": UN Special Rapporteur Francesca Albanese speaks at SOAS
UN Special Rapporteur Francesca Albanese visited campus earlier this month, where she gave a public lecture organised by the SOAS Centre for Human Rights Law. She spoke as part of a series of events held in London to highlight the current situation in the Middle East.
In her lecture, Albanese explored the historical context of the current conflict unfolding in Palestine, and the use of international law “as a tool of colonialism and imperialism” in the territory, both in the past and present day.
Speaking about her recently-published report “Genocide as Colonial Erasure”, she criticised those who have failed to categorise the conflict as genocidal, arguing that this failure has obscured the scale of the crisis and validated Israel’s actions in Gaza and the West Bank.
Watch the lecture recording on the SOAS YouTube channel.
Albanese recognised the efforts of students to draw attention to the crisis, and called on those present to remain vigilant and vocal in their defense of human rights: "We cannot allow the live genocide and its associated apathy to desensitise us to the violence, normalize the oppression, dissociate moral us from its failure, and legitimize the illegitimate."
Alone, we are free like wings of butterflies. But if we start flapping our wings in unison together, we will make a storm. And may justice be our storm.
About the speaker
Francesca Albanese holds an LLM in Human Rights Law from SOAS and has specialised in international law focusing on human rights and the Middle East. Since May 2022, she has served as the United Nations Special Rapporteur on the situation of human rights in the Palestinian territory occupied since 1967.
An affiliate scholar at the Institute for the Study of International Migration at Georgetown University, Albanese is the author of many leading publications on the international law dimensions of Israel/Palestine including (with Lex Takkenberg) the highly acclaimed Palestinian Refugees in International Law (Second edition, Oxford University Press, 2020).
This event was organised by the SOAS Centre for Human Rights Law at the SOAS School of Law, Gender and Media. It is the first in the Centre's event programme, the next of which will be held on 4 December 2024, featuring a discussion regarding the transformation of the prohibition against torture and its implications for arbitrary detention in Palestine, amongst other contexts.
