US Obliged to Issue Visa to Iran’s UN Envoy, MP Says
TEHRAN (Tasnim) — Rapporteur of the Iranian parliament’s National Security and Foreign policy Commission Seyed Hossein Naqavi Hosseini said the US decision to refuse a visa to Iran’s newly-appointed ambassador to the United Nations is contrary to the international laws.
According to the international laws, ambassadors to the UN are chosen and introduced to the organization by member states on the basis of the UN rules, and the US is obliged to issue a visa to them and cannot act based on its own desire, Naqavi Hosseini said in an interview with the Tasnim News Agency on Saturday.
On Tuesday, after the Senate voted to bar Hamid Abutalebi from the United States, the White House said the new Iranian ambassador to the UN will not be welcomed in the US, and described his nomination as “not viable”. The House of Representatives unanimously passed the same legislation on Thursday.
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.