Iran: US Ban on Envoy Harms International Diplomacy
TEHRAN (Tasnim) — Iran’s Deputy UN Ambassador Gholam Hossein Dehqani in a letter to UN Secretary General Ban Ki-moon described the US decision to deny a visa to Hamid Abutalebi, Tehran’s new UN ambassador appointee, as a dangerous precedent that could harm the international diplomacy.
In the letter issued on Monday, Dehqani requested a special meeting of a UN committee on the US move.
“This decision of the US government has indeed negative implications for multilateral diplomacy and will create a dangerous precedence and affect adversely the work of intergovernmental organizations and activities of their Member-States," the Iranian diplomat said.
"It requires to be well addressed in the Committee on Relations with the Host Country. The Permanent Mission of the Islamic Republic of Iran requests that the committee addresses this issue in an extraordinary and urgent manner," he said, Reuters reported.
Cyprus UN Ambassador Nicholas Emiliou, who chairs the 19-member committee dealing with issues including immigration and security, said a meeting would likely be held next week.
"They have specified that they do not request any action on the part of the committee. They simply wish to brief us for the time being at least," Emiliou said of Iran’s request.
On April 8, the Senate voted to bar Hamid Abutalebi from the US and the White House said he will not be welcomed in the country describing his nomination as “not viable”. The House of Representatives unanimously passed the same legislation on April 10.
Under a 1947 law that established the headquarters of the United Nations in New York, the United States is obligated to issue visas to diplomats assigned there, even those it finds objectionable.
According to reports, Washington has decided to deny a visa to Abutalebi over his possible involvement in the takeover of the US embassy in Tehran during post-revolution incidents in 1979.
On November 4, 1979, and in less than a year after the victory of the Islamic Revolution that toppled a US-backed monarchy, Iranian university students that called themselves "students following the line of (the late) Imam (Khomeini)" seized the US embassy in Tehran.
The students justified the takeover by insisting that the compound had become a center of espionage and planning to overthrow the newly established Islamic system in Iran.
The students occupying the embassy later published documents proving that the compound was indeed engaged in plans and measures to overthrow the Islamic system.
