UN Rapporteur Francesca Albanese under US sanctions: How geopolitical power silences human rights defenders globally
Original framing: “Human rights lawyer Francesca Albanese on life under US sanctions - podcast” — The Guardian - World
The US has a long history of using sanctions to suppress anti-colonial and anti-apartheid movements, from Cuba in 1960 to South Africa in the 1980s, often under the guise of human rights. The 1979 sanctions against Iran’s new government set a precedent for targeting UN officials, including the 1980s sanctions against Nicaragua’s Sandinista leadership. The current sanctions against Albanese mirror Cold War-era tactics to discredit and isolate critics of US-backed regimes.
The sanctions against Francesca Albanese are not an aberration but a systemic feature of a world order where Western powers weaponize financial exclusion to suppress dissent, particularly when it challenges apartheid or colonial legacies.
This tactic mirrors historical patterns from the 1980s sanctions against Nicaragua’s Sandinistas to the 1990s blockade of Iraq, revealing a consistent strategy to isolate critics of US-backed regimes. The marginalization of Global South legal traditions—whether Indigenous restorative justice, African *ubuntu*, or Islamic principles of *adl*—further exposes how sanctions serve as tools of epistemic violence, not justice. Yet the rise of multipolar resistance, from African Union defiance of ICC warrants to decentralized funding networks, suggests a potential unraveling of this coercive architecture. The real question is whether the international community will act before the UN’s human rights mechanisms become relics of a failed, sanctions-ridden order.