The United States government has officially expunged Francesca Albanese, the controversial United Nations investigator focusing on Palestinian Arab territories, from its federal sanctions registry, Reuters reported on Wednesday.
While no reasons were provide for the move, the formal delisting, which appeared on the US Treasury Department's official portal, comes precisely one week after a federal magistrate temporarily halted the economic penalties against Albanese, with the presiding judge determining that the Trump administration had almost certainly infringed upon the international lawyer's constitutional protections regarding free expression when it targeted her following her scathing public critiques of Israel's military campaign in Gaza.
Albanese has repeatedly come under fire over her anti-Israel bias. She was recently condemned by several European Union foreign ministers for comments made at an Al Jazeera conference, in which Albanese had said: “The fact that instead of stopping Israel, most of the world has armed, given Israel political excuses, political sheltering, economic and financial support ... We who do not control large amounts of financial capitals, algorithms and weapons, we now see that we as a humanity have a common enemy."
Albanese later claimed in an interview that she "never, ever, ever said ‘Israel is the common enemy of humanity,'" calling the accusations "completely false accusations."
Albanese’s history of anti-Israel statements and actions is well-documented and dates back to social media posts uncovered in 2022, in which she claimed that the “Jewish lobby" controls the US.
At the time, Albanese rejected arguments that the comments about the “Jewish lobby" were antisemitic and claimed they were “mischaracterized", but her anti-Israel bias has continued to be exposed since.
Her criticism of Israel has grown since Hamas’s October 7, 2023 attack in Israel which Albanese described as an act that must be viewed in “context" and as a response to Israeli “aggression."
In late March, Albanese claimed that the world has given Israel "a license to torture Palestinians", alleging that "torture has effectively become state policy" in Israel.
Responding to the comments, Israel's mission in Geneva said in a statement, "Francesca Albanese is not a promoter of human rights; she is an agent of chaos... and any document she produces is nothing but a politically-charged, activist rant."
Albanese "advocates dangerous extremist narratives to undermine the very existence of the State of Israel", it said.
The executive branch originally levied the sweeping financial and travel restrictions against Albanese in July 2025. At the time of the blacklisting, Washington justified the enforcement measures by pointing directly to her coordinated campaigns to instigate International Criminal Court action against American and Israeli politicians, business entities, and corporate executives.
The severe punitive measures effectively prohibited her from crossing US borders and froze her out of the American banking infrastructure entirely.
The legal path to overturning the restrictions began in February when Albanese's husband and her daughter, who holds American citizenship, filed a joint lawsuit against the Trump administration over the sanctions.
On May 13, US District Judge Richard Leon, presiding in Washington, ruled decisively in favor of the family's petition. Judge Leon concluded that Albanese’s foreign residency did not diminish her inherent First Amendment protections under the United States Constitution.