Els Torreele

Researcher/advocate for social justice and health rights, incl medical innovation prioritizing health needs and equitable access. 🇵🇸

[Els Torreele @ElsTorreele]

Health equity will only be achieved if we allow and support LMICs via knowledge and technology sharing to develop and produce the vaccines, treatments and diagnostics they need. We're talking global health commons, not luxury commodities. #INB #PandemicAccord #PandemicTreaty

[Els Torreele @ElsTorreele]

And that is what researchers and developers in the Global South aspire, as highlighted in this short video: https://t.co/0cd9n4W3Kv

[Francesca Albanese, UN Special Rapporteur oPt @FranceskAlbs]

I join Amnesty International in condemning #Eurovision and call everyone with a conscience not to watch it.
BIG THANK YOU to the 5 countries who withdrew from the competition:
Iceland!
Ireland!
Netherlands!
Slovenia!
Spain!

Put Apartheid out of our lives.

[Francesca Albanese, UN Special Rapporteur oPt @FranceskAlbs]

De Guernica a Gaza.

[𝐌𝐚𝐥𝐜𝐨𝐥𝐦 @Malcolm_Pal9]

Massive applause and praise for Francesca Albanese. She deserves even more.

Francesca Albanese was welcomed with loud applause as she entered a conference to present her book about the war in Gaza, showing strong support from the audience.

[Francesca Albanese, UN Special Rapporteur oPt @FranceskAlbs]

When will it be enough?
Thiago and Saif were kidnapped and are unlawfully detained by a state known for the torture and ill-treatment it inflicts on thousands of Palestinians.
Free Thiago & Saif
Free Palestine
Free us all from lawlessness and barbarism driven by predatory elites.

[Pedro Sánchez @sanchezcastejon]

La responsabilidad pública también implica la obligación moral de no mirar hacia otro lado.

Es un honor otorgar la Orden del Mérito Civil a una voz que sostiene la conciencia del mundo: @FranceskAlbs, Relatora Especial de la ONU en el territorio palestino ocupado.

[Yanis Varoufakis @yanisvaroufakis]

IN PRAISE OF FRANCESCA ALBANESE

There is a question that visits me in the small hours, when sleep will not come and the mind turns over old stones. The question is this: “What would I have done in the 1930s, on the morning after Kristallnacht?"

Not what I say I would have done. Not what I hope I would have done. But what would I actually have done—when the trains began to run, when the neighbours grew quiet, when the cost of decency became the loss of everything?

Most of us, I think, would have done little. Not from malice. From fear. From the soft, creeping conviction that someone else will speak, that the situation is complex, that we must be 'reasonable'. Lest we forget, the ordinary is the extraordinary's alibi. And how we have clung to that alibi! How we still cling to it!

And then, every once in a terrible while, someone appears who does not cling. Someone who steps forward when others step back. Someone who speaks the name of the thing when everyone else is busy naming something else.

Francesca Albanese is that someone.

She stands before the world—alone, unarmed, armed only with law and language and a rare courage—and she says what the centrists will not say, what the foreign ministries will not say, what the editorial boards will not say. She says: "This is a genocide. And we are watching it happen."

Do not tell me that is hyperbole. Do not tell me the term is contested. She has not used it lightly. She has used it as a physician arrives scientifically at a diagnosis—not to wound, but to warn. Not to inflame, but to name.

And for that, they have come for her. Oh, how they have come for her. Smears. Investigations. Vicious editorials. Frozen bank accounts. Dispossession of the only apartment she had ever owned. The machinery of the respectable turned to crush her. Because the respectable cannot abide what she represents: a mirror held up to their complicity.

Let us, once again, travel back to the 1930s. Back to the few who stood up when the trains began to run laden with Jewish people.

There was Aristides de Sousa Mendes, a Portuguese consul in Bordeaux. He defied his own government. He signed thousands of visas, by hand, for hours, until his fingers bled. He saved more lives than Schindler. And he died penniless, disgraced, erased.

There was a German officer in Warsaw named Wilm Hosenfeld. He hid a Jewish pianist in the rubble. He did not save thousands. He saved one. But that one—Władysław Szpilman—carried the memory. And memory is "the only haven from which we cannot be expelled."

There was Raoul Wallenberg. There were the villagers of Le Chambon. There were the anonymous, the quiet, the furious few who said: “Not on my watch.”

Francesca Albanese is their heir. Not because she carries a gun. Not because she hides refugees in her basement. But because she does something equally dangerous in a world that has perfected the art of not seeing. She sees. And she speaks.

She does not speak as a diplomat. Thank Goodness she doesn't! Diplomats have given us the language of "there are arguments on both sides" and "restraint" and "proportionality." Diplomatic language is the perfumed grave of moral clarity. No, she speaks as a jurist. As a human being. As a woman who has looked into the abyss and refused to call it a "complex geopolitical landscape".

Edna O'Brien once described a character who "had the recklessness of those who have already lost everything worth losing." Francesca Albanese has not lost everything. She has her dignity, her office, her voice, her family. But she has calculated the cost of speaking truth to power. And she has decided that that cost is infinitely less than the cost of silence.

What is that cost? Let us name it. She has been called antisemitic—she, who stands on the ground of international law forged in the ashes of Auschwitz and the fires of Nuremberg. She has been called a conspiracy theorist—she, who cites every source, every footnote, every UN resolution. She has been called naive—she, who understands better than most the machinery of realpolitik.

These accusations are not arguments. They are the spittle of the threatened. Because Francesca Albanese threatens something very precious to the powerful: the right to commit atrocity without being named.

Friends, the 1930s did not arrive with jackboots and pogroms on day one. They arrived in small increments. With "reasonable" restrictions. With "proportional" measures. With the silence of the respectable.

We tell ourselves that we would have been different. That we would have been Sousa Mendes. That we would have been Wallenberg. But most of us, I fear, would have been the neighbours who later said, "I didn't know."

Francesca Albanese knows. And she refuses to pretend otherwise.

So let us praise her. Not with statues or awards she does not seek. But with something harder: with our own refusal to look away. With our own voices, raised in places that are safe for us but dangerous for her. With our own bodies, if it comes to that.

A brave woman, who was injured while demonstrating outside a US nuclear military base in 1982, the infamous Greenham Common, had told me that "the heart is a hunter for what it cannot have." But I say the heart is a hunter for what it will not lose. And what we will not lose is the memory of those who stood up when standing up cost everything.

Francesca Albanese is standing up now. In our time. In our name. Under our indifferent sky.

Let us stand with her.

Not tomorrow. Not when it is safe. Now.

[Extract from a speech in Athens on Sunday 3rd May 2026]

[Francesca Albanese, UN Special Rapporteur oPt @FranceskAlbs]

My full AJ Forum speech last week: the common enemy of humanity is THE SYSTEM that has enabled the genocide in Palestine, including the financial capital that funds it, the algorithms that obscure it and the weapons that enable it.

[Owen Jones @owenjonesjourno]

BBC journalists have been banned from describing the kidnapped Venezuelan leader as having been kidnapped.

The BBC News Editor has sent this to BBC journalists.

[The BMJ @bmj_latest]

Behind the UK’s “landmark” pharma deal with the US lies a costly surrender — higher drug prices, weaker safeguards, and vague promises of investment, write @ElsTorreele and Martin McKee
https://t.co/7Wyc4TzvNL

[Paty Meza @PatyMezaC]

@GSMFlotilla

[Adrian Zahir⚡ @ForwardsMarch]

🚨BREAKING 🚨:

Dr. Hussam Abu Safiya, Director of Kamal Adwan Hospital in Northern Gaza, has been nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize after Doctors for Gaza from the Netherlands put his name forward.

A Palestinian paediatrician and neonatologist, Abu Safiya was born on 21 November 1973 at Jabalia Refugee Camp in Gaza, his family having been kicked out from Hamama during the 1948 Nakba.

Abu Safiya is in prison under Israel’s “Unlawful Combatants” law, which allows extended detention without the standard legal processes.

Since his arrest, Dr. Abu Safiya has reportedly been held under harsh and abusive conditions:

Denied adequate medical care.

Suffering serious health issues: heart enlargement, high blood pressure, irregular heartbeat.

Weight loss of over 15kgs in a short period.

Solitary confinement, physical abuse including beatings and other mistreatment.

HIS MISTAKE?

He stayed and continued to provide medical care at Kamal Adwan when Northern Gaza was under siege.

Abu Safiya has become a symbol of Gaza’s crumbling healthcare system under dire conditions. His work and arrest have drawn international attention and concern.

[Mohamad Safa @mhdksafa]

I don’t have anything else to say except that they’re Kidnapping humanitarian workers in international waters trying to feed starving children during a genocide.

The people of Gaza have the right to aid even under occupation.

[Progressive International @ProgIntl]

The @ProgIntl calls on movements, parties and unions to organize not just in defence of this Flotilla but in defence of humanity itself. It is our collective responsibility to break the siege and liberate Palestine from colonial occupation.

[Progressive International @ProgIntl]

BREAKING 🇵🇸 Moments ago, the Global Sumud Flotilla (@gbsumudflotilla) was violently intercepted by Israeli Occupation Forces.

Hundreds of participants — including @davidrkadler, Co-General Coordinator of the @ProgIntl — are being abducted.

[African Alliance @Afri_Alliance]

6/ And still, the Majority World shares pathogen samples, data, trial sites, people—while high-income countries hoard patents, products, and power.
This is not a new injustice. It’s a pattern. A colonial one.

[African Alliance @Afri_Alliance]

3/ What’s missing?
🧬 Binding access to vaccines, tests, treatments
💰 Financial guarantees for prevention & R&D
💡 Mandatory tech transfer
🌍 Decentralized innovation capacity
In short: everything needed to make “equity” real.

[African Alliance @Afri_Alliance]

1/ The @WHO Pandemic Agreement has been finalized—but let’s be clear: this is no cause for celebration. @Afri_Alliance responds with fire:
“We refuse to celebrate scraps while injustice festers.”
👇🏾 A thread.

[FEPS @FEPS_Europe]

The #EUTaxSymposium 2025 took place yesterday at the EP under the theme "Strengthening competitiveness and fairness to build prosperity"

Fairness means tackling #TaxAvoidance! It simply makes no sense that the super-rich pays proportionally less tax than those on lower incomes. The super-rich must also pay their fair share.

🔴 The EU needs to introduce a minimum capital income tax!

Why? How? Find out in our policy study “Tackling tax avoidance"
📕https://t.co/mHV8qEuGvr

[MSF Sea @MSF_Sea]

Another avoidable tragedy in the central Mediterranean: 6 dead, 40 missing after shipwreck near Lampedusa.

Survivors reported that some of the missing had fallen off the boat in rough seas.

https://t.co/WepmRLwcyE

[Kathleen Van Brempt @kvanbrempt]

The Commission remains completely deaf to the European Parliament’s call to suspend the MoU with #Rwanda and refuses to answer specific questions from MEPs on the matter. Even now that the Council is imposing sanctions. What are you waiting for, @EU_Commission? (1/2)