Washington grants UNGA visas to Pezeshkian and Araghchi under shopping and travel limits

The U.S. State Department confirmed on Thursday that it has approved visas for Iran’s core United Nations delegation, including President Masoud Pezeshkian and Foreign Minister Abbas Araghchi, to attend next week’s High-Level Week. The statement used host-country language. “Consistent with our host country obligations, the core delegation from the Iranian regime will be able to attend U.N. General Assembly High-Level Week.”

The same statement attached conditions. The mission will be smaller than in 2025. Movement in New York will be restricted. Purchases of luxury goods and wholesale-club memberships remain banned for Iranian UN mission staff, visiting officials and dependents. Spokesman Tommy Pigott put the shopping ban in public terms: the United States will not let Iranian officials treat the Assembly as a retail trip “paid for by the Iranian people’s suffering.”

Pezeshkian is scheduled to address the 81st Assembly on Wednesday. Donald Trump is scheduled to speak on Tuesday. The seating chart therefore places the two wartime presidents in successive spotlight slots, with Treasury talks between Scott Bessent and Chinese Vice Premier He Lifeng also on the New York calendar. The 1947 Headquarters Agreement is the legal reason the visas exist. Washington still claims a right to refuse on security and foreign-policy grounds. It used that claim against Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas and a list of Palestinian Authority officials, who were denied entry for a second year and will speak, if at all, by video.

The contrast is the story that other missions will read. Iran is at war with the host state and still gets a scaled delegation onto First Avenue. The Palestinian leadership is not at war with the host state in the same sense and does not. Both decisions sit inside the same week. Neither decision reopens Hormuz.

High-Level Week runs from 22 to 28 September under Assembly President Khalilur Rahman of Bangladesh and the theme “Restoring trust, managing transformation: A United Nations that delivers for all.” About 130 heads of state and government are expected in person. Side meetings include a 40th-anniversary session on the Declaration on the Right to Development on 23 September and a sea-level meeting on 24 September. Those items will fill the schedule. The unscripted item is whether Pezeshkian and Trump use adjacent days to send any signal about navigation in the Gulf.

There is no public sign of a negotiation that would restore ordinary transit through the strait or reopen talks on Iran’s nuclear file. The visa is not a ceasefire. It is a host-country minimum plus a shopping list of prohibitions. For New York police and the Secret Service it is a motorcade problem. For the rest of the membership it is a test of whether the Assembly floor can still hold two governments that are exchanging fire at the same time they exchange speeches.

Pakistan has already said Prime Minister Shehbaz Sharif will treat the week as a chance to push a negotiated end to the U.S.-Iran war. That is a third capital trying to use the same corridor. The only document the host has issued so far is the visa note. The speeches on Tuesday and Wednesday will show whether anyone intends to add a second document.