UPDATED: Francesca Albanese: The world is watching its conscience collapse

Francesca Albanese stood before more than 3 500 people at the Sandton Convention Centre in Johannesburg on Saturday evening and told them the world was watching its conscience collapse.

“The laws created to stop states from destroying each other are now being used to justify that destruction,” she said.

Delivering the 23rd Nelson Mandela Annual Lecture, the United Nations Special Rapporteur on the situation of human rights in the Occupied Palestinian Territories drew a direct line between Mandela’s ideals and what she called “the cruelest injustice of our time.”

Under the theme Enhancing Peace and Global Cooperation, her address became an unflinching reckoning with the failures of international law and the moral decay of the global order.

Former international relations minister and Nelson Mandela Foundation chair Naledi Pandor introduced Albanese as “a woman of conscience and courage,” pushing back against critics who accused the foundation of being “weaponised” by hosting her. 

“Nelson Mandela was an incredible weapon,” Pandor said. “We honour him by using his legacy to confront power.”

Albanese thanked South Africans for “opening the door for others to act” through their case before the International Court of Justice — “a moment of historic resonance,” she called it, placing the country once again at the centre of a global struggle for justice.

“Supporting Palestinian self-determination is not an act of charity. It is a legal obligation. The occupation is illegal and must be dismantled, totally and unconditionally.”

Mandela’s name, she argued, could not be invoked without confronting power. “Peace without justice is not reconciliation — it’s surrender.”

Her lecture drew from her recent UN report, From Economy of Occupation to Economy of Genocide, which traces how global industries sustain and profit from Israel’s military campaign.

“The machinery of genocide is not only made of weapons,” she said. “It is designed, financed and insured.”

She said Gaza had become “a wasteland of ruins and human remains where survival itself has become defiance”.

”The devastation was not collateral but “systematic, by design” — the product of an economic model that treats destruction as growth. “Diplomacy has become a way to procrastinate genocide.”

No country was exempt from complicity, Albanese said. “Even South Africa, doing so many good things for Palestine — when you look at trade, at resources that still reach Israel — no one has clean hands. Justice for Palestine starts here.”

The laws conceived to protect humanity were being hollowed out, she warned. “When a UN mandate holder is punished for calling genocide by its name, it shows how far the system has decayed.”

Still, accountability remained possible. “We may be witnessing the death of one world order and the birth of another. If the United Nations fails, it is up to its members — up to us — to reclaim the values it betrayed.”

Introducing the Arabic concept of sumud — steadfastness — she called it “the sister of ubuntu.” The grandmother in Gaza replanting her olive tree each time settlers uproot it; the teacher rebuilding a classroom in a tent after her school is destroyed — these, she said, are acts of sumud. Both ubuntu and sumud speak to endurance and shared humanity. “Our dignity is inseparable from the dignity of others.”

Quoting from a note in the foundation’s archive written by Mandela, she read: Some have left an indelible mark; others are remembered for what they tried to do in the name of justice. Those words, she said, “echo from South Africa to Italy, from Palestine to Sudan, from Australia to the United States — nations built on lands taken through centuries of genocide”.

Albanese reflected on her own formation: taught to see the Holocaust as Europe’s defining moral lesson, but not to connect it to colonialism.

“By exceptionalising the Holocaust as the only aberration in our history, we Europeans concealed the many other crimes of empire. The hierarchies of race and power that justified colonialism have not disappeared. They are alive today — and Gaza exposes them.”

Her message to Palestinians: “Whatever happens, Palestine will be remembered not as a footnote in the chronicles of the powerful, but as the newest verse in a centuries-long struggle against injustice.”

In conversation with journalist Redi Tlhabi, Albanese and Pandor explored the state of international law, UN reform and what Pandor called “the unfinished business of justice.” 

The former minister said the legal framework established after World War II remained essential “for the vulnerable and the victims” but required stronger enforcement. Justice, Albanese replied, “is a promise that must be delivered daily”.

After the lecture’s standing ovation, confusion rippled through the adjoining media centre, where a briefing had been scheduled. Journalists waiting to speak with Albanese said she had been escorted into a private meeting with senior Foundation members.

On Sunday morning, the ministry of justice and constitutional development confirmed that there had been an irregular attempt to serve Albanese with court papers. In a statement, Minister Mmamoloko Kubayi said an official in her department had acted without authorisation and that the service did not comply with the required legal process. The ministry withdrew the action and extended an unconditional apology to Albanese, the Nelson Mandela Foundation and the United Nations.

With the clarification, what first appeared to be a diplomatic incident revealed itself as bureaucratic overreach — but one that underscored the political sensitivity surrounding Albanese’s work. Her mandate, she has said, is “independent and unpaid, guided by conscience and law” — and often, by controversy.

That interruption did not erase the force of the address, but it hinted at the close scrutiny that follows Albanese wherever she speaks. Her mandate, she has said, is “independent and unpaid, guided by conscience and law” — and often, by controversy.

Her words had landed with precision.

“Courage is not the absence of fear but the refusal to be bound by it. Silence is the only real defeat. Hope and solidarity are not moods. They are work.”

Few lectures meet their moment. This one did.

*This story has been updated with comment from the ministry of justice and constitutional development