For over two years, my mandate has been the subject of carefully orchestrated and increasingly virulent accusations. On 8 February a French MP attacked me personally on the basis of manipulated statements, falsely attributing to me the claim that Israel is ‘the common enemy of humanity’, when in fact the targets of my remarks were the countries which have supplied Israel with weapons, and the traditional and social media that have amplified genocidal rhetoric.

Without bothering to verify what I had said or examine the facts, France’s foreign minister Jean-Noël Barrot immediately spread these attacks internationally, condemning remarks I never made as ‘outrageous and culpable’ and announcing that France would contact the UN Human Rights Council to seek my resignation.

His Italian, German and Czech counterparts followed suit, without carrying out the most basic checks. On 19 February the French prime minister, Sébastien Lecornu, publicly repeated the same demand. While criticism is an inherent part of any public office – especially when human rights are involved – this episode has revealed a troubling dimension: some states relentlessly attack the messenger rather than challenging the message.

What is unprecedented and corrosive about this attack on an independent expert who works for the UN is not only the violence of the accusations and the deliberate fabrication of lies. It’s also – and especially – the fact that the strategy was directed and endorsed at the highest levels of the state. It is therefore no longer simply a controversy, but indicative of the failure of a system: one built on solemn promises and international treaties, which are invoked in peacetime, but which get buried when applying them is inconvenient.

I was appointed as special rapporteur, a voluntary role, by the UN Human Rights Council and in May 2022 began my term, which runs until 2028. I’m the eighth holder of this post, and the first woman to occupy it. I (…)

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(1) See the full text of my statement at the Al Jazeera Forum (AJ Forum), X, 9 February 2026.

(3) See Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison, Pantheon Books, New York, 1977.

(4) Nadera Shalhoub-Kevorkian, Incarcerated Childhood and the Politics of Unchilding, Cambridge University Press, 2019.

(10) UN News, 16 September 2025, news.un.org/.

(13) See ‘Detailed findings on attacks carried out on and after 7 October 2023 in Israel’, United Nations, 10 June 2024, www.ohchr.org/.