The protests faced in recent days by the Mayor of Reggio Emilia, Marco Massari, while presenting an award to UN rapporteur Francesca Albanese, are a deeply troubling sign. The mayor’s “offense” was to include the liberation of all Israeli hostages held by Hamas terrorists among the necessary conditions for achieving a ceasefire in Gaza. A sacrilege, apparently, for which Albanese, in her infinite magnanimity, granted “forgiveness” — provided that it does not happen again. Through a perverse antisemitic line of reasoning, victims are transformed into perpetrators, deemed undeserving of any solidarity — let alone liberation.
During a press conference held in the Italian Senate on September 18 and hosted by Senator Giulio Terzi, Hillel Neuer, Executive Director of UN Watch — a highly active NGO at the UN Human Rights Council — demonstrated how Albanese has long acted, both within and outside the United Nations, in violation of the rules governing her position as a UN Special Rapporteur. Neuer presented extensive evidence of Albanese’s lack of objectivity, independence, integrity, and neutrality; her statements inciting violence; and opaque sources of funding for certain trips and conferences.
Albanese’s conduct reveals a total absence of objectivity, reflecting the UN’s growing indifference toward the principle of proportionality and its entrenched double standards. One need only recall the remarks made by Secretary-General António Guterres in the aftermath of the October 7 pogrom: “The attacks by Hamas did not happen in a vacuum,” he said, implying that decades of Israeli occupation were the real cause. Or consider the tribute paid by the UN General Assembly to Iranian President Ebrahim Raisi, who died in a helicopter crash in May last year. Only the refusal of European and U.S. representatives to attend prevented that homage from becoming an unbearable display of honor toward a brutal dictator who had been personally involved in repressing opponents since the 1980s.
But the clearest illustration of the UN’s double standards lies in the numbers. Between 2015 and 2025, the UN General Assembly adopted the following number of resolutions of condemnation: Russia 29, Syria 12, the United States 11, North Korea 10, Myanmar 9, Afghanistan 1, and zero against Venezuela, Pakistan, Algeria, Turkey, China, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, Cuba, Iraq, and Iran. Against Israel: 173.
These figures are the direct consequence of the central and destabilizing role played by authoritarian regimes, particularly within the UN Human Rights Council — the very body charged with protecting and promoting the world’s highest human rights standards. Of its 47 member states, roughly half are authoritarian or only partially free. Among them are oppressive regimes such as Qatar, Algeria, China, Cuba, and Sudan.
The issue of a United Nations rendered powerless and distorted by the overwhelming presence of dictatorial regimes was raised decades ago by Marco Pannella. In January 1991, during a public rally, the Radical Party leader stated:
“Until two years ago, the UN was the expression of the immense totalitarian Soviet empire — a vast desert of democracy, half national-socialist and half socialist-national, stretching across the Third World, where dictatorships were imposed both by Stalinist designs and by the West’s lack of faith in its own ideas, in order to promote regimes that were all excellent buyers of weapons. Until yesterday, the UN was composed 85% of a monstrous mass of diplomats representing this gigantic empire of evil, which based its power, especially in the Third World, on extermination through hunger, misery, and wars among entire populations and generations.”
It was a harsh assessment, yet it did not prevent Pannella from successfully leading UN-based campaigns for universal human rights — including the global moratorium on the death penalty.
Today, however, the UN seems reduced to a mere echo chamber for Francesca Albanese and for the disinformation campaign against Israel — and by extension, against human rights and international law itself.
What is urgently needed is a renewed effort to defend the right to know, beginning with the resolution approved by the Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe and the Extraordinary Human Rights Commission of the Italian Senate. Only by reaffirming this right — and by confronting the moral and institutional hypocrisy within the UN system — can the defense of universal human rights regain credibility and meaning.
Matteo Angioli