The media have spent the past several days investigating new White House press secretary Katie Zacharia's legal credentials. She admitted that she failed the California bar exam, even though she has repeatedly called herself a lawyer.
This is legitimate news. Not because a White House press secretary needs a law license, but because someone in a position of public trust should not misrepresent her credentials.
But there is another prominent public figure with a remarkably similar problem: Francesca Albanese, the UN Special Rapporteur on Palestinian territories.
In her 2021 application for the UN position, Albanese described herself as a "human rights lawyer by training and call." Her official UN biography still describes her as an "international lawyer."
Yet in a May 2025 interview with Vanity Fair Italia, Albanese admitted that she had never taken the examination required to practice law in Italy because she had never wanted to practice there.
UN Watch documented the discrepancy and called for an investigation. Albanese remains in her UN position.
The media is curiously unconcerned. The controversy has attracted nowhere near the attention devoted to Zacharia over the past two days.
Both women studied law. Neither needs a license to perform her current job. But there is a significant difference: Zacharia's job is communicating White House policy. Albanese's job involves interpreting international law, issuing legal conclusions and producing reports accusing Israel of some of the gravest crimes imaginable.
Surely the accuracy of Albanese's claimed legal credentials deserves at least as much scrutiny as Zacharia's.
If misleading the public about legal credentials is a scandal when someone works for Donald Trump, why isn't it a comparable scandal when someone makes international legal accusations against Israel under the authority of the United Nations?
To ask the question is to answer it.
