Italian Senator Giulio Terzi has sent a letter to Italian Foreign and International Cooperation Minister Antonio Tajani, calling to consider the future of UN Special Rapporteur for Palestinian Territories Francesca Albanese, over her controversial remarks on Israel, JPost reports.
His letter was sent after two NGOs approached UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres and UN High Commissioner for Human Rights Volker Turk regarding their “utter dismay and outrage at the abhorrent statements made by Ms. Francesca Albanese… in the wake of the wave of terror perpetrated against civilians in Israel this past week, and call for her immediate dismissal.”
The calls to dismiss Albanese come after recent comments she made on Twitter, in which she claimed that Israel can’t claim its right to defend itself against “the people it oppresses/whose lands it colonizes.”
Those comments came following the terrorist murders of Italian tourist Alessandro Parini and British-Israeli sisters Rina and Maia Dee and their mother Lucy. Albanese explicitly said that “Israel does not have a right to self-defense against Palestinian terror, thereby directly endorsing the murder of Israeli civilians, including children,” the two NGOs said, according to JPost.
In Terzi’s letter he said that, “given that the spokesmen of the International Legal Forum and of the Solomon Observatory on Discrimination, which fights antisemitism, have sent to the secretary UN General and to the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights an open letter to express ‘the total consternation and indignation for the serious statements made by Mrs. Francesca Albanese,’ and other statements made by her, he called to abide the “United Nations code of conduct,” since “the activities carried out by the special rapporteurs must follow criteria of ‘impartiality and objectivity.'”
Terzi added that the positions expressed by the special rapporteur would appear to run the risk of contradicting the principles of impartial and rigorous application of international law for all Member States of the United Nations and of the principles concerning human rights, fundamental freedoms and the rule of law.”
Terzi further asked whether the foreign minister was aware of the facts and whether he thought he could “take action,” with the Secretary General of the UN, in order to “obtain the appointment of a special rapporteur on the situation of human rights in the Palestinian territories, who has the essential requirements of impartiality, objectivity and assessment consistent with the principles and norms of international law binding on all UN member states.”
Albanese previously came under fire after the Times of Israel revealed that, in an open letter posted to her Facebook page in 2014, she castigated the US and Europe for their conduct during Operation Protective Edge and wrote, “America and Europe, one of them subjugated by the Jewish lobby, and the other by the sense of guilt about the Holocaust, remain on the sidelines and continue to condemn the oppressed &mdash the Palestinians &mdash who defend themselves with the only means they have (deranged missiles), instead of making Israel face its international law responsibilities.”
In another post from that year, which has since been hidden, Albanese referred to the Israel lobby and Israel”s greed in comments directed at the BBC over its coverage of the conflict.

Albanese later rejected arguments that the comments about the “Jewish lobby” were antisemitic.
In February, a bipartisan group of US Congress members called on the UN to remove Albanese, after she refused to condemn a ramming attack in the Ramon neighborhood of Jerusalem, in which three people were murdered.