A weeks-long pause on punitive measures against the United Nations Special Rapporteur on Palestine Francesca Albanese has come to an abrupt end, after a federal appeals court granted the US government’s request to temporarily suspend a lower court ruling that had blocked the sanctions on First Amendment grounds. The restoration of the sanctions was formally confirmed in an official notice published to the US Treasury Department’s website this Wednesday.
The origins of the dispute stretch back to July 2024, when the Donald Trump administration first placed Albanese on the Specially Designated Nationals (SDN) list. The designation came just weeks after the independent UN expert released a sharply critical report that documented more than 60 companies—including major U.S.-based technology giants Google, Amazon and Microsoft—it accused of contributing to what Albanese framed as the shift of Israel’s occupation economy into a system enabling genocide in Palestinian territories. The report called on the International Criminal Court (ICC) and national judicial bodies around the world to open investigations and pursue criminal prosecutions against implicated company executives and corporate entities, a recommendation that directly prompted the Trump administration’s sanction action.
Since the designation was first imposed, Albanese has faced sweeping restrictions: she is barred from entering the United States, all of her assets located within U.S. jurisdiction are frozen, and she has been cut off from the global financial system, unable to carry out even routine daily transactions, she told Middle East Eye in an earlier interview.
In February 2025, Albanese’s family launched a legal challenge to the sanctions after the UN declined to waive her official diplomatic immunity, which prevented her from filing suit in her own name. The plaintiffs were her husband Massimiliano Cali, a senior World Bank economist, and the couple’s U.S.-born daughter, a U.S. citizen. They argued that the penalties were a direct punishment for Albanese’s public criticism of Israel’s military campaign in Gaza, and that the measures had unnecessarily disrupted the family’s ability to access basic financial services. On May 13, U.S. District Judge Richard Leon sided with the family, issuing a broad temporary injunction that blocked enforcement of the entire sanction designation.
Leon ruled that the sanctions were highly likely to violate the First Amendment to the U.S. Constitution, as they explicitly targeted Albanese for the content of her protected speech. “Protecting the freedom of speech is always in the public interest,” Leon wrote in his opinion. He further noted that Albanese’s recommendations to the ICC carried no legally binding weight, and amounted to nothing more than the expression of an expert opinion, not actionable conduct that would justify punitive measures. Rejecting the federal government’s request to narrow the ruling to only apply to Albanese’s family members, Leon ordered the full designation set aside, opening a brief window where the sanctions were not in effect. Following that ruling, the State Department confirmed it had complied with the order by temporarily removing Albanese from the SDN list, but stressed the move did not represent a shift in policy, and that it would pursue an appeal to restore the designation.
Last Friday, that appeal yielded an early victory for the government: a three-judge panel of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit granted a temporary administrative stay of Leon’s injunction, clearing the way for the sanctions to be put back in place immediately. The appeals court emphasized that its procedural order was not a judgment on the underlying merits of the government’s appeal, but merely intended to preserve the status quo while the panel considers the broader request to keep the lower court ruling on hold throughout the duration of the appeals process. The court has not yet announced a timeline for ruling on the government’s full motion for a stay pending appeal.
As a result of the stay, Albanese has been formally returned to the Treasury Department’s SDN list. The designation once again bars any U.S. person or entity from engaging in financial transactions with her, restores her exclusion from the global financial system, and extends a travel ban that bars Albanese and her immediate family members from entering the United States.
In its appeal arguments, the Department of Justice has argued that as an Italian citizen who has not resided in the United States for roughly a decade, and whose critical speech took place outside U.S. borders, Albanese falls outside the protections of the U.S. Constitution. The government’s legal motion describes Leon’s injunction as “legally indefensible and grossly overbroad,” warning that if the ruling is allowed to stand, it will cause lasting damage to core U.S. national security and foreign policy interests.
Albanese is not the only prominent figure to face U.S. sanctions over work investigating alleged international crimes in occupied Palestinian territories. Since the start of 2025, the Trump administration has already sanctioned ICC Chief Prosecutor Karim Khan, his deputy prosecutors, and eight ICC judges over the court’s investigations into war crimes committed in occupied Palestine and Afghanistan. Three Palestinian non-governmental organizations that have collaborated with the ICC to submit evidence of alleged crimes by Israeli officials have also been placed under U.S. sanctions.