The US State Department clarified on Thursday that the removal of anti-Israel UN rapporteur Francesca Albanese from the American sanctions list is merely a temporary legal adjustment rather than a shift in foreign policy, Reuters reported.
Washington initially slapped heavy financial sanctions on Albanese in July 2025, penalizing her for aggressive campaigns aimed at instigating International Criminal Court (ICC) prosecutions against American and Israeli government officials, corporate entities, and private executives.
However, the restrictions were hit with a roadblock earlier this month when a federal judge issued a temporary injunction against the sanctions. The court ruled that the Trump administration likely infringed upon Albanese's free-speech protections by blacklisting her following her vocal condemnations of Israel's military operations in Gaza.
In response to the judicial setback, the administration made it clear that it is actively fighting to reinstate the punitive measures.
"The Government has appealed the court's order," the State Department said in a statement quoted by Reuters.
American officials explicitly noted that they are prepared to re-apply the blacklisting immediately if they find success in the appellate court system.
"In the event the D.C. Circuit stays or overturns that order, the Government intends to restore Ms. Albanese's name to the SDN List," it said referring to the list of Specially Designated Nationals.
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.
(Israel National News' North American desk is keeping you updated until the start of Shavuot in New York. The time posted automatically on all Israel National News articles, however, is Israeli time.)