Joshua Schewitz is a researcher and analyst specializing in Africa and the Middle East, with a focus on security-related topics in addition to blockchain technology.
United Nations Special Rapporteur Francesca Albanese’s October 2025 visit to South Africa was neither an academic tour nor a humanitarian mission. It was a deliberate act of political defiance against the West, particularly the United States, orchestrated by the Department of International Relations and Cooperation (DIRCO) and the Nelson Mandela Foundation (NMF).
At the time, Albanese was under active U.S. Treasury sanctions for “directly engaging with the International Criminal Court (ICC) to investigate, arrest, or prosecute nationals of the United States or Israel.” Yet in South Africa, she was treated as a dignitary and provided security, state coordination and high-profile platforms.
The Justice Department blocked lawful service of foreign legal papers; DIRCO, South Africa’s foreign ministry, facilitated her travel and parliamentary access, and the Mandela Foundation, under the chairpersonship of former Foreign Minister Naledi Pandor, lent moral cover and institutional prestige.
What might have embarrassed South Africa became instead a display of pride. The visit validated Albanese’s work and integrated her into the lawfare network supporting South Africa’s International Court of Justice (ICJ) case against Israel.
Albanese’s political worldview was shaped long before her U.N. appointment. From 2010 to 2012, she served as a legal officer for UNRWA in Jerusalem, helping draft a “strategic framework” aligning agency policy with human rights mechanisms. During this period, South Africa’s Gift of the Givers organization operated in Gaza, running clinics in UNRWA facilities later shown to be near Hamas operations.
Her bias was never subtle. During the 2014 Gaza war, she wrote that the United States was “subjugated by the Jewish lobby.” Her subsequent work, including UNRWA and Palestine Refugee Rights: New Assaults, New Challenges (2018) and Palestinian Refugees in International Law (2020), advocated for the Palestinian “right of return” and compensation from Israel.
When she applied for the position of U.N. Special Rapporteur in November 2021, her application echoed DIRCO rhetoric almost verbatim, including her call to “re-empower multilateralism” to correct the “asymmetry of power between Israel and the Palestinian Authority.”
Her integration into South Africa’s political-legal ecosystem began with Professor John Dugard, who helped establish the lawfare framework behind the ICJ genocide case. Dugard’s Law4Palestine platform published her book, Protecting Human Rights in Occupied Palestine, co-authored with Dugard and former U.N. rapporteurs Richard Falk and Michael Lynk. Dugard laid the intellectual foundation; Pandor turned it into foreign policy.
After Pandor lost her parliamentary seat in 2024, she became chair of the Mandela Foundation, continuing to direct DIRCO’s anti-Israel alignment. At the NMF’s annual keynote on Oct. 25, Pandor admitted she had “twisted Albanese’s arm” to come to South Africa, confirming the visit was personally orchestrated at the highest level.
The NMF’s hosting of Albanese turned a moral institution into a propaganda platform. Albanese’s keynote accused Western democracies of complicity in genocide, demanded an arms embargo on Israel, and praised South Africa for leading the “moral fight.” NMF’s head of dialogue, Sumaya Hendricks, called her report “a necessary foundation for state action.”
On Oct. 28, Albanese attended a scheduled meeting at the South African Parliament’s International Relations Committee. Despite the quorum not being met — a parliamentary requirement for official business — she claimed to have “met with South Africa’s lawmakers,” and DIRCO celebrated “facilitating dialogue with Parliament.” The optics conveyed legitimacy while avoiding formal scrutiny, shielding the government from potential U.S. political repercussions.
The U.N. enabled Albanese despite proven financial misconduct. Her protection was political, not procedural. Her reports are cited by NGOs feeding into the ICJ case, forming a self-reinforcing propaganda loop. Hosting Albanese exposed the Mandela Foundation and DIRCO to potential Office of Foreign Assets Control (OFAC) violations, with NMF donors including the Ford Foundation, Google, the Open Society Foundation and PepsiCo facing reputational and legal risk.
The ICJ case against Israel is the operational culmination of a campaign that began with Dugard, evolved through Pandor, and is now executed by Albanese. South Africa’s foreign policy has become the institutional home of this movement, using the UN and courts to convert political narratives into judgments. DIRCO acts as an engine of ideological activism, and the NMF advances division under a moral guise.
Albanese’s visit confirmed that South Africa’s institutions have been captured by a lawfare network. She is not a neutral UN rapporteur; she is a political operative merging anti-Western ideology, Islamist activism, and state-backed lawfare. Parliament’s failure to meet quorum reflected the institutional void at the heart of South Africa’s diplomacy.
Albanese left having strengthened her network, proving that the Mandela legacy, the U.N. platform and South Africa’s foreign ministry now serve to weaponize law. South Africa positions itself at the forefront of a global soft-power lawfare campaign against the U.S. and its allies, notably Israel, undermining both its diplomatic credibility and the principles of justice it claims to uphold.
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