UN Special Rapporteur Francesca Albanese described in a lengthy interview with The Guardian the consequences of the US sanctions imposed on her by Trump in July 2025 following her report “Anatomy of a Genocide” on Gaza. She described the impact as “civil death”: her family’s apartment in Washington was confiscated, her accounts were frozen, and she was cut off from any global credit card system since most transactions pass through US-controlled networks.

Her family was not spared either. Pro-Israel activists led a campaign that resulted in her husband being pushed out of his leadership position at the World Bank. In Tunisia, she received anonymous phone threats of her 13-year-old daughter being raped and kidnapped, with callers even naming her school. In Germany, authorities sent riot police and threatened her with arrest on charges of “trivializing the Holocaust.”

So this is what “freedom” looks like when you step out of line.

You write a report the wrong people don’t like, and suddenly your life gets erased. Bank accounts gone. Home gone. Career gone. Even your family gets dragged into it. And not quietly either, but with coordinated pressure and public smearing.

And wow to how normalized this has become. The US still sells itself as the global referee of human rights, but the moment someone uses that same language in a way that’s inconvenient, the system turns on them completely. Financial infrastructure becomes a weapon. Institutions fall in line. Allies follow suit.

People talk about sanctions like they’re some abstract foreign policy tool. This is what they actually look like on a human level. Not “accountability,” not “values,” just total suffocation of a person’s ability to exist normally.

And somehow this is still branded as defending freedom.

See: The limits on the (allowed) freedom of speech