The United States said on Thursday that it was loosening draconian movement restrictions imposed by the Donald Trump administration on Iranian diplomats accredited to the United Nations headquarters in New York, with a view to reducing tensions between Washington and Tehran.
“The idea is to take steps to remove unnecessary obstacles to multilateral diplomacy by amending limitations on internal travel that have been extremely restrictive,” a State Department official told reporters.
As part of his maximum pressure campaign on Iran, Trump in 2019 banned Iranian diplomats from traveling beyond a few blocks from the UN headquarters and its mission.
Iranian Foreign Minister Mohammad Javad Zarif said that even during a visit to the UN he was banned from visiting a colleague in a New York hospital.
The State Department indicated that Iranian diplomats would still be subject to diplomatic restrictions applied to nations with bad relations with the United States, such as North Korea, that need authorization to go beyond a 25-mile radius of downtown Manhattan.
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