Sunday Times 2
US blacklist poses summit hurdle for UN
View(s):By Thalif Deen
UNITED NATIONS (IPS) – When the 193-member General Assembly commemorates the UN’s 80th anniversary during a high-level meeting in mid-September, how many political leaders and delegates will be barred from entering the United States—despite the 1947 US-UN Host Country Agreement?
US President Donald Trump last June issued a proclamation titled “Restricting the Entry of Foreign Nationals to Protect the United States From Foreign Terrorists and Other National Security and Public Safety Threats”.
This White House proclamation—a virtual blacklist—restricts travel into the US by nationals from 19 countries. They will be refused US visas.
The list includes Afghanistan, Myanmar, Burundi, Chad, the Republic of the Congo, Cuba, Equatorial Guinea, Eritrea, Haiti, Iran, Laos, Libya, Sierra Leone, Somalia, Sudan, Togo, Turkmenistan, Venezuela, and Yemen. In addition, Egypt is under review.
But will this result in barring political leaders and UN delegates?
Any denial of visas will be a violation of Sections 11-14 of the Host Country Agreement, which ensures “that representatives of member states, UN officials, and others with legitimate business can access the headquarters district without significant impediments.”
But the agreement also stipulates the US will facilitate the issuance of visas for those with UN-related travel needs.
That agreement, along with the Convention on the Privileges and Immunities of the United Nations, outlines the legal framework for the UN’s presence and operations in the US. It covers aspects like the privileges and immunities of UN representatives, officials, and their families, as well as the handling of disputes and other practical matters.
So far, the US has imposed sanctions on the UN Special Rapporteur on the situation of human rights in the Palestinian Territory, Francesca Albanese, because of her critical report on Israel.
Reacting to the announcement, UN Spokesperson Stéphane Dujarric told reporters last month the imposition of sanctions on UN special rapporteurs sets a “dangerous precedent”.
“The use of unilateral sanctions against Special Rapporteurs or any other UN expert or official is unacceptable,” he told journalists.
He also highlighted the independent mandate and the role of the special rapporteurs, noting that member states “are perfectly entitled to their views and to disagree with” the experts’ reports.
“But we encourage them to engage with the UN’s human rights architecture,” he added.
Volker Turk, the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights, urged the US to reverse the sanctions and said the attacks and threats against Albanese and other Human Rights Council mandate-holders “must stop”.
Meanwhile, the US has also imposed sanctions on officials of the Palestinian Authority and members of the Palestine Liberation Organisation (PLO), accusing them of undermining peace efforts with Israel—even as other Western powers moved toward recognition of Palestinian statehood.
Judging by the Trump administration’s track record and its violations of federal rules and legislation, will the US adhere to the Host Country Agreement or ignore it?
Dr. Alon Ben-Meir, a retired professor of international relations, most recently at the Centre for Global Affairs at New York University (NYU), told IPS, “Knowing Trump’s track record, he will find any way to tamper with any system or law just so that people will talk about it—good, bad, or in between, as long as he is front and centre of what’s happening around him.”
He doesn’t only want to assert authoritarian governance here in the United States; he is also trying to project himself as the leader of the whole world, wanting foreign leaders to bow to him, said Dr Ben-Meir.
“Many of his actions, including his deeply misguided tariffs, are his attempt to use his power to show that he is above all other leaders in the world. I wouldn’t put it past him to try to create problems for the upcoming UN General Assembly meeting in September.”
Most likely, he will block any UNSC resolution critical of Israel and any resolution recognising a Palestinian state.
Norman Solomon, executive director of the Institute for Public Accuracy and national director of RootsAction.org, told IPS that contempt for the United Nations is nothing new coming from Washington, although it has varied in extent and candour over the decades.
UN Photo/Mark Garten. The preambular words of the UN Charter displayed at the United Nations Headquarters, in New York.
“While US administrations have always sought to bend the world body to its nationalistic will, some US presidents have participated in the UN with an extent of good faith.”
The current Trump administration, he pointed out, is at the opposite end of the spectrum, making no effort to conceal its utter contempt for the precepts of the UN and making no effort to do anything but undermine it.
“Barring diplomats from entering the United States to participate in UN proceedings is beyond the pale—an expression of extreme arrogance that violates not only the basic principles of the UN but also conveys the global aspirations of US foreign policy. The de facto approach is “Do as we say, not as we do.”
There is much to condemn in the human rights records of many of the governments that the Trump regime seeks to bar from entrance to the United States, he argued. At the same time, a country notably absent from the list is Israel, which is waging a genocidal war on Palestinian people made possible by massive nonstop arms shipments from the US.
While the US exercises veto power and leverage within the Security Council, the General Assembly is a venue where justified distrust and anger toward the US can only grow, given the policies of the US government, declared Solomon, author of “War Made Invisible: How America Hides the Human Toll of Its Military Machine”.
The US has, in the past, been accused of imposing unfair travel restrictions on UN diplomats.
Pleading national security concerns, Washington, in a bygone era, had long placed tight restrictions on diplomats from several “unfriendly” nations, including those the US had deemed “terrorist states”, particularly Cuba, Iraq, Iran, North Korea, Sudan, Syria and Libya.
UN diplomats from these countries, posted in New York, also have to obtain permission from the US State Department to travel outside a 25-mile radius from New York City.
When former Sudanese President Omar Hassan al-Bashir, accused of war crimes, was refused a US visa to attend the high-level segment of the General Assembly sessions in September 2013, Hassan Ali, a senior Sudanese diplomat, registered a strong protest with the UN’s Legal Committee.
“The democratically elected president of Sudan had been deprived of the opportunity to participate in the General Assembly because the host country, the United States, had denied him a visa, in violation of the UN-US Headquarters Agreement. It was a great and deliberate violation of the Headquarters Agreement,” he said.
The refusal of a visa for the Sudanese president was also a political landmine because al-Bashir had been indicted for war crimes by the International Criminal Court (ICC).
But one question remained unanswered: Does the US have a right to implicitly act on an ICC ruling when Washington is not a party to the Rome Statute that created the ICC?
When Yasser Arafat, the leader of the Palestine Liberation Organisation (PLO), was denied a US visa to visit New York to address the United Nations back in 1988, the General Assembly defied the United States by temporarily moving the UN’s highest policy-making body to Geneva—perhaps for the first time in UN history—providing a less-hostile political environment for the PLO leader.
Arafat, who first addressed the UN in 1974, took a swipe at Washington when he prefaced his statement by saying, “It never occurred to me that my second meeting with this honourable Assembly, since 1974, would take place in the hospitable city of Geneva.”
(This article contains excerpts from a book on the United Nations titled “No Comment – and Don’t Quote Me on That”, available on Amazon and at the Vijitha Yapa bookshop. The book is authored by Thalif Deen, Senior Editor at the UN Bureau of Inter Press Service (IPS) news agency, who is also an ex-UN staffer and twice a former member of the Sri Lanka delegation to the General Assembly sessions. The link to Amazon via the author’s website follows: https://www.rodericgrigson.com/no-comment-by-thalif-deen/)