For a second year in a row, the United States will deny access to the United Nations headquarters district to Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas, whose Palestinian Authority administers parts of the occupied West Bank. Why is this happening, where did it start, and is the United States within its rights to take such an action?
The United States has, quite literally since before the days of Arafat, cherry-picked a list of individuals and foreign leaders whose access to the UN it has sought to forestall or outright deny, despite the general guarantees of such travel that the U.S. government made in the UN Headquarters Agreement .
The United States and the UN signed the Headquarters Agreement at Lake Success, New York, on June 26, 1947, and it entered into force on November 21, 1947, setting out mutual obligations between the two on many matters, such as the inviolability of the headquarters district, police protection, public services, and diplomatic privileges for resident representatives. The United States, perhaps most famously in Section 11, agreed not to place any impediment on transit to or from the headquarters district, which centers on the UN site on Manhattan’s East Side between First Avenue and the FDR Drive from East 42nd to East 48th Streets, for certain classes of individuals traveling there on official business. Representatives of member states, including heads of state and government, UN staff, accredited press, representatives of recognized NGOs, and other persons the UN invites on official business are covered under the agreement.
Palestine, as a non-member observer state, falls within that last class, and the United States itself had acknowledged a general obligation to permit PLO Observer Mission personnel to enter and remain for their official UN functions. Section 12 then makes the guarantee apply regardless of the relations between those persons’ governments and the United States.
The United States has nevertheless chosen to refuse this travel benefit to certain individuals and world leaders. When it does, it often defends itself by citing a provision in the joint resolution by which Congress authorized the agreement, which states that “Nothing in the agreement shall be construed as in any way diminishing, abridging, or weakening the right of the United States to safeguard its own security and completely to control the entrance of aliens into any territory of the United States other than the headquarters district and its immediate vicinity . . .”
The United States has used this reservation as its escape mechanism, reading the right to safeguard its security as separate from its control over entry outside the district, and it has interpreted the reservation as giving it broad authority to exclude particular UN invitees on national security grounds. Beyond that, it has been accused of delaying visas beyond the point of usefulness or using other administrative steps to frustrate the travel. The UN has repeatedly disagreed with that interpretation, taking the position since 1953 that the provision was never accepted as a reservation and does not qualify the access guaranteed by Section 11. Complaints have also been brought to the Committee on Relations with the Host Country about the United States hampering, or at least slowing, visa issuance and travel for delegations from countries it treats as adversaries, such as Russia, Cuba, and Venezuela.
At last year’s UN General Assembly, the United States famously turned on Mahmoud Abbas, who had addressed the General Assembly in person as recently as 2024 and whose security risk is questionable at best, since the State Department framed the denial as a way to hold the PLO and PA accountable rather than as a finding that Abbas himself posed a threat. In August 2025, the United States denied and revoked visas for him and about 80 other Palestinian officials, relying not on the Headquarters Agreement but on visa sanctions it had imposed that July under Section 604(a)(1) of the Middle East Peace Commitments Act of 2002, which leaves the security reservation as its likely defense if the denial is challenged as a breach of the agreement. The reason, of course, was political, since the last General Assembly was famous for its broad recognition of Palestine by allies who had long resisted doing so, including the United Kingdom, Canada, Australia, Portugal, and France. The United States feared embarrassment on its own soil and sought to forestall or hamper what Abbas would have treated as a moment of celebration.
This year, Trump intends to do the same, and the reason is again political, though it is less about the optics of allies recognizing Palestinian statehood than about punishing the Palestinians for seeking redress against Israel, a close ally of the Trump administration, in international tribunals such as the International Criminal Court (ICC) and the International Court of Justice (ICJ), which the State Department named directly in its announcement. It is also a palatable and measurable step for Trump’s pro-Israel base and a jab at the UN, which Trump has repeatedly disparaged, as well as at other intergovernmental bodies, given that his administration has sanctioned ICC officials and in January 2026 ordered the United States to withdraw from 66 international organizations, 31 of which are UN entities.
There is little that the Palestinian Authority can do in these circumstances. Interestingly, Palestinian delegates who were already posted to the Palestinian mission in New York and who regularly worked at the UN were spared any visa revocation, because the State Department has maintained a standing waiver for personnel assigned to the PLO Observer Mission to the UN, as it did in 2025. There is a clear reason for this, and it is not an incidental one. The United States is in some sense aware of its obligations and its failure to comply with the Headquarters Agreement. Its escape mechanisms are the security reservation and domestic statutes (the 2002 MEPCA provision now in use and a 2014 statute Congress passed to keep Iranian diplomat Hamid Aboutalebi out), and none of them was resolved through Section 21 arbitration in the earlier visa disputes involving Yasser Arafat, Aboutalebi, and now Abbas.
The ICJ, however, recalled in 1988 that international law prevails over domestic law. Those mechanisms are built mainly for denying a visa or entry to those who are overseas seeking to travel, while those already living in the United States are in a different position. Section 13(b) of the agreement bars requiring them to leave for anything done in their official capacity, and it allows removal proceedings only for abuse outside that capacity, only with the secretary of state’s prior approval, and only after consultation with the member state or, for others such as observers, the secretary general.
The Headquarters Agreement is a bilateral agreement between the United States and the UN, so neither Palestine nor Abbas can invoke Section 21, since that dispute mechanism belongs to the UN and the United States. Abbas himself ordinarily could not obtain judicial review of an overseas consular visa denial because of the doctrine of consular nonreviewability . Within the agreement, Section 21 requires that any dispute not settled by negotiation go to a tribunal of three arbitrators, one named by the secretary general, one named by the secretary of state, and a third chosen by those two or, if they cannot agree, by the president of the International Court of Justice. No published arbitral award under Section 21 has surfaced in the public record. The closest the mechanism came to use was in 1988, when the secretary general invoked it and named the UN arbitrator, and the ICJ advised that the United States was obligated to arbitrate over its attempt to close the PLO observer mission, before a federal court ruled that the statute behind that closure did not override the agreement.
No one has pressed the matter beyond that point since. At last year’s General Assembly, Mahmoud Abbas was forced to address the Assembly by video with no one arbitrating. Absent a reversal, this year will be no different.
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Washington Keeps Abbas from the UN, Again
Aggregated summary from an independent source. Read the original at FPIP.