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The Trump Administration Reverses U.S. Position on UNRWA Immunities

Part of: AJIL Contemporary Practice of the United States

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  14 November 2025

Lori Fisler Damrosch
Lori Fisler Damrosch*
Affiliation:
Columbia University
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International Organizations
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American Journal of International Law , Volume 119 , Issue 4 , October 2025 , pp. 790 - 797
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© The Author(s), 2025. Published by Cambridge University Press on behalf of American Society of International Law

On April 24, 2025, the U.S. Department of Justice submitted a letter in a civil lawsuit that maintains for the first time that the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East (UNRWA) is not immune from U.S. civil litigation.Footnote 1 The letter reverses the position taken by the previous administration in the same lawsuitFootnote 2 and alters nearly eight decades of U.S. practice concerning the immunities of UN entities that are considered subsidiary organs of UN principal organs and thus part of the United Nations itself. Heretofore, the government stated that such organs are entitled to absolute immunity under U.S. treaty obligations. The new position regards UNRWA as an agency with separate legal personality and hence ineligible for the absolute immunity applicable to the United Nations, and it downgrades the immunities of high-ranking UN officials responsible for UNRWA’s activities. The executive branch’s change of position is significant not only for this lawsuit and for UNRWA, but also for UN-affiliated bodies more generally, and for UN officials, including officers at or above the rank of UN assistant secretary-general who enjoy the equivalent of diplomatic immunities under applicable international law. The reversal implicates questions of the international law of immunities, as well as the constitutional and statutory law of the United States. Specifically, the new position will require U.S. courts to address such issues as: whether the U.S. president has constitutional authority to determine the immunities of an entity created by the UN General Assembly; whether courts should autonomously interpret the applicable treaties and statutes dealing with the immunities of such an entity; what degree of deference (if any) should be accorded to a new executive treaty interpretation, announced for the first time in litigation where the prior administration had twice affirmed longstanding positions on the same questions; and how the relevant statute on international organizations immunity should be interpreted in relation to a subsequent and self-executing treaty on UN immunities.

International immunities have been a central feature of U.S. practice and judicial decisions since the earliest days of the republic. Immunities of diplomats were accepted as part of the “law of nations” and thus part of U.S. law already at the time of the founding of the United States. U.S. cases have given effect to foreign sovereign immunity for more than two centuries, going back to Chief Justice John Marshall’s decision in Schooner Exchange v. McFaddon.Footnote 3 When the United States entered the modern era of participation in a plethora of international organizations, Congress enacted a statute, the International Organizations Immunities Act (IOIA), to ensure that organizations in which the United States participates would enjoy the “same immunity from suit and every form of judicial process” as that enjoyed by foreign states.Footnote 4 Two treaties to which the United States is party—the Charter of the United Nations and the Convention on the Privileges and Immunities of the United Nations (CPIUN)—generally oblige the United States to grant absolute immunity from legal process to the United Nations, including its principal and subsidiary organs, and they also establish the relevant immunities for individuals who serve the United Nations as international civil servants or in capacities such as experts on mission, or who are representatives of their states to the United Nations.Footnote 5

The purpose of such immunities is not to shield entities and individuals from accountability, but rather, in the case of international organizations, to ensure that multimember institutions can carry out their functions without being subjected to the potentially divergent legal regimes of each participant—193 member states in the case of the United Nations, each of which would have its own laws and courts (of which some federal states, like the United States, could have multiple jurisdictions and laws, any of which might be a potential forum in the absence of immunity). For the United States, which has hosted the United Nations since 1945 and hosts many other international organizations as well, the international immunities regimes under the numerous separate treaties applicable to such organizations are differentiated according to the nature of the functions of the organization in question, with only a relatively small number eligible for the absolute immunity conferred on the United Nations.

Typically, treaty-based immunity regimes for international organizations lay out not only their specific immunity rules, but also the mechanisms for ensuring that the organization will abide by its contracts, compensate those injured by its employees, and ensure that its officials comply with applicable laws—and even face criminal prosecution where justice so requires—with dispute settlement provisions in case of disagreement between the organization and a member over fulfillment of these and other obligations.Footnote 6 However, UN immunity from domestic litigation is not contingent upon the availability of such accountability mechanisms and is not removed by virtue of allegations of breach of the internationally binding treaty.Footnote 7 As with other forms of immunity—including those enshrined in constitutional law, as well as international law—applicable legal regimes strike a balance, which is justified by the overall public interest.

The lawsuit in which the Trump administration reversed the U.S. government’s prior position on UNRWA’s immunity alleges that UNRWA and its officers enabled Hamas’s October 7, 2023, attacks on Israel in which plaintiffs’ family members were kidnapped and killed.Footnote 8 The plaintiffs allege that UNRWA’s activities in Gaza facilitated these horrific acts by providing monetary and material support to Hamas. Along with UNRWA, the defendants include: Philippe Lazzarini, UN under-secretary-general and commissioner-general of UNRWA; Filippo Grandi, former commissioner-general of UNRWA and now UN high commissioner for refugees; and other UN officials who served as UNRWA’s commissioner-general, deputy commissioner-general, or director of UNRWA’s New York Representative Office.

As a member of the United Nations, the United States is bound by Article 105 of the UN Charter, which provides that the organization “shall enjoy in the territory of each of its Members such privileges and immunities as are necessary for the fulfillment of its purposes,”Footnote 9 and that officials of the organization “shall similarly enjoy such privileges and immunities as are necessary for the independent exercise of their functions in connection with the Organization.”Footnote 10 The details of these immunities have been fleshed out in the CPIUN (also known as the General Convention), to which the United States became party in 1970. The CPIUN provides that the United Nations and its property and assets, “wherever located and by whomsoever held, shall enjoy immunity from every form of legal process except insofar as in any particular case it has expressly waived its immunity.”Footnote 11 As regards UN officials, the CPIUN sets out the privileges and immunities applicable to certain categories of officials,Footnote 12 who shall “be immune from legal process in respect of words spoken or written and all acts performed by them in their official capacity.”Footnote 13 Specified high-ranking UN officials shall additionally be accorded “the privileges and immunities, exemptions and facilities accorded to diplomatic envoys, in accordance with international law.”Footnote 14 Immunities of officials can be waived by the UN secretary-general “where, in his opinion, the immunity would impede the course of justice and can be waived without prejudice to the interests of the United Nations.”Footnote 15 In the lawsuit in question, the United Nations has not waived any of the immunities to which it or its organs or officials are entitled under international law, but rather has explicitly claimed them.

Separate legal regimes apply to UN specialized agencies, as set forth either in their own constitutive instruments or in another multilateral treaty, the Convention on the Privileges and Immunities of the Specialized Agencies (CPISA), to which the United States is not party.Footnote 16 For specialized agencies in which the United States participates, the agency’s own charter typically lays out the applicable level of immunity (absolute or functional) and thus establishes the extent of the international obligations of the United States to accord immunity to the agency itself and to its officials. Further obligations owed by the United States to the United Nations are spelled out in a headquarters agreement providing for inviolability of the headquarters district and the immunities of representatives to the United Nations and certain other personnel.Footnote 17

The interaction between these treaty obligations and the domestic legal system of the United States is complex. The UN Charter is understood to be a non-self-executing treaty, which creates internationally binding obligations but is not directly enforceable in U.S. courts.Footnote 18 However, the CPIUN is different: consistent with the position of both the executive and the legislative branches at the time that the Senate gave advice and consent in 1970, U.S. courts have uniformly treated it as self-executing and have given direct effect to its rules on absolute immunity for the United Nations, as well as to its rules on the specified immunities of all UN officials for their official acts, and on diplomatic immunities (essentially complete immunity) for high-ranking UN officials.Footnote 19

Relevant statutory law begins with the 1945 IOIA, enacted at the start of a new era for the United States, which had had little experience with international institutions in the interwar period and needed a more-or-less “off-the-shelf” legal framework for joining the many new organizations that it was simultaneously helping to design and establish. The IOIA provides in relevant part that international organizations “shall enjoy the same immunity from suit and every form of judicial process as is enjoyed by foreign governments, except to the extent that such organizations may expressly waive their immunity for the purpose of any proceedings or by the terms of any contract.”Footnote 20 In 1945 and for some time thereafter, that “same immunity” was understood as virtually absolute immunity. Years later, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that the statutory term “same immunity” is to be interpreted with reference to subsequent changes in the immunity “enjoyed by foreign governments,” notably the shift from an absolute to a restrictive view of sovereign immunity, under which foreign sovereigns carrying out commercial and certain other private activities could be sued in relation to those private acts.Footnote 21 At the same time, the Supreme Court noted that an international organization’s charter can always specify a different level of immunity, as many do—citing the CPIUN as an example of a treaty conferring absolute immunity.Footnote 22

UNRWA was established by a 1949 resolution of the UN General Assembly to carry out humanitarian functions previously performed by United Nations Relief for Palestine Refugees.Footnote 23 Subsequent resolutions refer to UNRWA as a UN “subsidiary organ” established by the General Assembly, as do UN publications such as the Repertory of Practice of UN Organs and the UN Juridical Yearbook.Footnote 24 UNRWA’s mandate has been periodically renewed by General Assembly resolutions, most recently in a 2022 resolution to extend the mandate until June 30, 2026.Footnote 25

The legal issues concerning UNRWA’s immunities in litigation are distinct from limitations and prohibitions which the U.S. Congress has placed from time to time on the use of appropriated funds for UNRWA’s activities, as well as from executive branch decisions to withhold funding from UNRWA as a matter of policy. Recent instances of such funding restrictions include a pause by the Biden administration in January 2024; a congressional prohibition enacted in March 2024 to run through March 31, 2025; and an executive order issued by President Donald J. Trump early in his second term.Footnote 26

The Trump administration’s April 2025 statement implicates questions of public international law, including the interpretation of the UN Charter and the CPIUN in light of other international legal norms. At the same time, it entails a variety of difficult questions within the U.S. domestic legal order, arising from the U.S. Constitution and federal statutes and how U.S. international legal obligations relate to these and other sources of U.S. law.

In respect of international law (in particular the law of the UN Charter), a key question is whether UNRWA qualifies as a “subsidiary organ” of the UN General Assembly. This requires the interpretation of that term (which is used in several articles of the UN Charter),Footnote 27 with reference to other relevant Charter provisions and with resort to the modes of interpretation used by international interpreters. Similarly, the sphere of application of the CPIUN depends on the proper interpretation of that instrument as an international treaty, in order to determine whether UNRWA qualifies for the immunities specified therein. As regards UN and UNRWA officials, further issues of treaty interpretation arise, in relation to which acts of which UN personnel qualify as “official”; which officials are additionally entitled to the higher level of status-based diplomatic immunity during their service; and what immunities persist for UN officials even beyond their term of office. The Trump administration’s April 2025 statement denies that the UN Charter and the CPIUN confer on UNRWA and its officials the levels of immunity that the United Nations itself claims on their behalf. To that extent, the statement formulates international legal arguments.

Alongside these issues of international law, questions of fundamental importance arise under the Constitution and laws of the United States. Among other concerns, the Trump administration’s April 2025 statement explicitly claims for the president of the United States the authority to decide which UN entities and personnel are or are not UN subsidiary organs entitled to immunities in the United States. Aspects of that statement frame legal arguments in the discourse of international law—for example, that the General Assembly’s powers under the UN Charter entail only deliberative, recommendatory, and budgetary functions, rather than operational ones;Footnote 28 that the Charter does not envisage a role for the Assembly in delivering social services such as humanitarian aid in field operations; and that the Assembly thus lacks Charter-based powers to establish a subsidiary organ to carry out functions that are not entrusted to the Assembly under the Charter itself: “nemo dat qui non habet—no one may transfer more than he owns.”Footnote 29 At the same time, and interwoven with the international legal arguments, the statement draws on U.S. legal sources, sometimes as arguably relevant to the international legal issues (at least by way of analogy), but sometimes apparently to suggest, either explicitly or implicitly, that U.S. authorities control in case of divergence—and that the president has ultimate power to confer or revoke immunity.

The April 2025 statement relies on the IOIA as a statutory source of authority for the president to decide that UNRWA is not entitled to UN immunities and that UN personnel affiliated with UNRWA likewise must be denied immunity under international and U.S. domestic law.Footnote 30 It draws on U.S. case law under the Foreign Sovereign Immunities Act (FSIA),Footnote 31 including dicta that immunity is a matter of “grace and comity,”Footnote 32 as relevant to the IOIA’s instruction that international organizations enjoy the “same” immunity as foreign sovereigns. Under the new interpretation, the April 2025 statement makes a statutory argument for leaving it within the president’s discretion to determine “whether UNRWA is entitled to such grace here.”Footnote 33 However, the FSIA explicitly removed from the executive branch the authority to make binding determinations of sovereign immunity. Thus, the logic of the “same” immunity for international organizations under the IOIA is that the courts, not the president, are to decide how the immunity rules apply in particular cases. The “grace and comity” language in post-FSIA case law is premised on the assumptions that Congress has set the criteria and that the courts, not the executive branch, make the relevant case-by-case determinations.Footnote 34

Both on the surface of the April 2025 statement, and also in the subsequent briefing by the parties in response to the Trump administration’s filing, lie the constitutional questions of how much deference the courts should give to the U.S. government’s new position on how to interpret the treaties in question; whether a change of course in the midst of a lawsuit deserves a lower degree of deference or none at all; and ultimately whether U.S. courts can autonomously interpret a self-executing treaty to give it a different meaning from the executive branch’s most recent position. U.S. Supreme Court cases, of course, regularly recite that executive branch views on treaty interpretation are entitled to “great weight,” especially where the executive has been consistent in its position.Footnote 35 Only rarely, but very significantly, has the Supreme Court given a treaty an interpretation different from the one maintained by the executive.Footnote 36 As regards the relationship between authoritative international treaty interpretations and the meaning of the same treaty in U.S. domestic law, the Supreme Court says that it gives “respectful consideration” to an interpretation of an international court with jurisdiction to interpret a treaty, but that the U.S. court is not bound by the international interpretation.Footnote 37

A striking aspect of the April 2025 statement is the executive branch’s position acknowledging the CPIUN as a self-executing treaty which, if applicable to UNRWA, would confer a broader grant of immunity than the IOIA’s default rules.Footnote 38 In light of that acknowledgment (indeed, concession), the same statement goes to great lengths to explicate the executive’s new position that the General Assembly, as a matter of international law, lacks power to create a “subsidiary organ” to perform operational functions as UNRWA does. The statement does not seriously engage, however, with the now well-established body of international law applicable to the United Nations, elaborated by the International Court of Justice in the Certain Expenses case,Footnote 39 confirming the authority of the General Assembly to establish peacekeeping operations, nor with the holdings of U.S. district and circuit courts that such operations—and many other operational activities of UN organs established by the General Assembly—fall within the scope of the UN’s own immunities under the CPIUN.Footnote 40 In the absence of such engagement, there is little credibility to the new executive position, which is at variance with the reasoned views of all prior interpreters of the treaty.

The issues raised transcend this particular case, with implications not only for UNRWA and its officials, but also for other UN-affiliated bodies and personnel. The first two U.S. statements of interest, and also the UN filings on behalf of UNRWA and the individual UN officials, referred to a range of other UN subsidiary organs created by the General Assembly that in prior litigation have been held to be entitled to the same absolute immunity from legal process that the United Nations itself enjoys. These include UN peacekeeping missions,Footnote 41 the UN Development Programme,Footnote 42 UNICEF,Footnote 43 the World Food Programme,Footnote 44 and the UN Joint Staff Pension Fund.Footnote 45 The immunities of those and many other comparable entities could be affected if U.S. courts accept the legal rationales articulated in the Trump administration’s statement.Footnote 46 Although U.S. courts—federal and state, trial and appellate, and from several U.S. circuits—had previously and uniformly interpreted the CPIUN to confer absolute immunity on entities that the United Nations itself considers to be UN subsidiary organs, the Trump administration’s new views on executive power to decide on U.S. treaty obligations in relation to immunities could presage future efforts to undermine the immunities of the organs covered by those prior decisions.Footnote 47

References

1 See Benjamin Weiser, U.S. Reverses Itself, Saying UNRWA Can Be Sued in New York, N.Y. Times (Apr. 26, 2025), at https://www.nytimes.com/2025/04/26/nyregion/us-reverses-position-gaza-unrwa-suit.html; Letter Addressed to Judge Analisa Torres from Yaakov M. Roth and Jay Clayton (Apr. 24, 2025), Estate of Kedem Siman Tov v. UNRWA, No. 1:24-cv-04765-AT (S.D.N.Y.), at https://drive.google.com/file/d/1ZxlR-Ox3LNF5d_xNhnoUIJYAVNCkwd8_/view [https://perma.cc/KT5N-WUMH] [hereinafter April 2025 Statement]. U.S. victims of Hamas attacks have recently filed a new lawsuit in the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia against UNRWA and other defendants, in which UNRWA’s immunity (or lack thereof) will be again at issue, in an even broader context than in Estate of Kedem Siman Tov. See Ephrat Livni, American Victims of Hamas and Hezbollah Attacks Sue U.N. Agency, N.Y. Times (Aug. 2, 2025), at https://www.nytimes.com/2025/08/02/world/middleeast/unrwa-hamas-hezbollah-lawsuit.html. The suit encompasses UNRWA’s activities in Lebanon as well as Gaza and the West Bank, and also UNRWA’s non-profit U.S. affiliate, in a time frame from 2018 to the present. See Complaint, Estate of Sha’arabany v. UNRWA, No. 1:25-cv-02490 (D.D.C. July 31, 2025).

2 See Letter Addressed to Judge Analisa Torres from Damian Williams (July 30, 2024), Estate of Kedem Siman Tov v. UNRWA, No. 1:24-cv-04765-AT (S.D.N.Y.), at https://drive.google.com/file/d/1rSD5aG_KcZzITbX8bWVWrO2NseBcIWYj/view [https://perma.cc/R6XW-Z5ZP] [hereinafter July 2024 Statement]; Letter Addressed to Judge Analisa Torres from Damian Williams (Oct. 18, 2024), Estate of Kedem Siman Tov v. UNRWA, No. 1:24-cv-04765-AT (S.D.N.Y.), at https://drive.google.com/file/d/1o8Xg_45U6URlW2JmuxOX11pY-TowKMsz/view [https://perma.cc/E9Y7-977F] [hereinafter October 2024 Statement].

3 Schooner Exchange v. McFaddon, 11 U.S. (7 Cranch) 116 (1812).

4 International Organizations Immunities Act of 1945, 22 USC § 288a–e [hereinafter IOIA].

5 Convention on the Privileges and Immunities of the United Nations, Feb. 13, 1946, 1 UNTS 15 [hereinafter CPIUN].

6 See, e.g., id. Art. V, Sec. 20 (Secretary-General’s duty to waive UN officials’ immunity where immunity “would impede the course of justice and can be waived without prejudice to the interests of the United Nations”), Art. VIII, Secs. 29–30 (provisions on dispute settlement). The International Law Commission is currently developing draft guidelines on the “Settlement of Disputes to Which International Organizations Are Parties.” See Charles Chernor Jalloh, The International Law Commission’s Seventy-Fifth (2024) Session: Immunity of State Officials from Foreign Criminal Jurisdiction and Other Topics, 119 AJIL 107, 120–22 (2025).

7 See, e.g., Georges v. United Nations, 834 F.3d 88 (2d Cir. 2016).

8 See April 2025 Statement, supra note 1, at 1 (UNRWA “played a significant role in those heinous offenses”).

9 UN Charter, Art. 105(1).

10 Id. Art. 105(2).

11 CPIUN, supra note 5, Art. II, Sec. 2.

12 Id. Art. V, Secs. 17–21.

13 Id. Art. V, Sec. 18(a).

14 Id. Art. V, Sec. 19. The legal regime for immunities of diplomatic envoys (reflecting customary international law) is found in the Vienna Convention on Diplomatic Relations, Apr. 18, 1961, entered into force for the United States Nov. 13, 1972, 23 UST 3227, TIAS No. 7501, 500 UNTS 95 [hereinafter VCDR]. VCDR provides that diplomatic agents “shall enjoy immunity” from both criminal and civil jurisdiction, with only limited exceptions for private immovable property, private inheritance matters, and professional or commercial activity outside a diplomat’s official functions. Id. Art. 31.

15 CPIUN, supra note 5, Art. V, Sec. 20.

16 UN Convention on the Privileges and Immunities of the Specialized Agencies, Nov. 21, 1947, entered into force Dec. 2, 1948, 33 UNTS 261.

17 See Agreement Between the United Nations and the United States of America Regarding the Headquarters of the United Nations, June 26, 1947, 61 Stat. 3416, TIAS No. 1676, 11 UNTS 11 [hereinafter Headquarters Agreement]. The Headquarters Agreement has not yet figured as such in the UNRWA litigation, except to the extent that plaintiffs’ efforts to serve the defendants with legal process had to be undertaken outside the headquarters district.

18 See Medellín v. Texas, 552 U.S. 491, 507 (2008).

19 See, e.g., Brzak v. United Nations, 597 F.3d 107, 112 (2d Cir. 2010) (in a suit alleging sexual harassment of a UN employee by a high-level UN official, “the United Nations enjoys absolute immunity from suit unless ‘it has expressly waived its immunity’”); Georges, supra note 7, at 98 (reaffirming Brzak in a suit involving UN peacekeepers in Haiti); see also Emmanuel v. United States, 253 F.3d 755, 756 n. 2 (1st Cir. 2001) (“United Nations immunity is absolute unless expressly waived.”). For references to state courts that likewise have given direct legal effect to CPIUN’s immunity provisions in actions against UN organs and officers, see notes 43, 45 infra. For the executive position as conveyed to the Senate in 1970, see Statement of John R. Stevenson, Legal Adviser, Department of State, S. Exec. Rep. No. 91-17, App. at 13, 16 (“the convention is self-executing and no implementing legislation is necessary”). The Senate Foreign Relations Committee expressed the same view in its report on the CPIUN. See id. at 5. The Trump administration’s April 2025 statement acknowledges the CPIUN’s self-executing character and thus attempts to establish that UNRWA is not a UN organ covered by the CPIUN. See text at notes 33–40 infra (on extent of president’s claim of authority to decide on immunities).

20 IOIA, supra note 4, § 288a(b).

21 See Jam v. Int’l Fin. Corp., 586 U.S. 199 (2019).

22 See id. at 214 (also citing the Articles of Agreement of the International Monetary Fund).

23 See GA Res. 302(IV) (Dec. 8, 1949).

24 See, for example, General Assembly Resolution 513 (VI) (Jan. 26, 1952), and other resolutions and UN publications cited in the July 2024 and October 2024 statements, supra note 2, and in the UN responses to plaintiffs’ filings.

25 See GA Res. 77/123 (Dec. 12, 2022).

26 See Jacob Katz Cogan, Contemporary Practice of the United States, 119 AJIL 314, 316–17 (2025) (discussing 2018 and 2024 funding pauses, 2024 statute, and February 2025 executive order ending UNRWA funding); Withdrawing the United States from and Ending Funding to Certain United Nations Organizations and Reviewing United States Support to All International Organizations, Exec. Order 14199, 90 Fed. Reg. 9275 (Feb. 10, 2025); see also Jean Galbraith, Contemporary Practice of the United States, 112 AJIL 306 (2018) (on withholding and termination of UNRWA funding during first Trump administration); Jean Galbraith, Contemporary Practice of the United States, 113 AJIL 143–44, 148–49 (2019).

27 Specifically, Article 7(1) of the Charter provides for establishment of the General Assembly and other principal organs, and Article 7(2) provides: “Such subsidiary organs as may be found necessary may be established in accordance with the present Charter.” Article 22 further provides: “The General Assembly may establish such subsidiary organs as it deems necessary for the performance of its functions.”

28 See April 2025 Statement, supra note 1, at 3–8 (citing various Charter articles, UN documents, and commentators on the UN Charter, along with analogous U.S. legal authorities).

29 Id. at 4.

30 The statement is ambiguous, however, in respect of whether defendants Lazzarini and Grandi might be entitled to diplomatic immunity by virtue of their current UN positions, as contrasted to their current or former UNRWA positions. Id. at 9.

31 28 U.S.C. §§ 1330, 1602–1611.

32 Rubin v. Islamic Republic of Iran, 583 U.S. 202, 208 (2018); Verlinden B.V. v. Central Bank of Nigeria, 461 U.S. 480, 486 (1983).

33 April 2025 statement, supra note 1, at 1, 3–7.

34 The FSIA gives priority to “existing international agreements to which the United States is party.” 28 U.S.C. § 1604. CPIUN is such a treaty; and the FSIA’s logic thus requires courts, not the president, to interpret and apply it in respect of UN subsidiary bodies.

35 Medellín, supra note 18, at 513. In this context, the Supreme Court has taken note when the executive has “unfailingly adhered” to a given position, not only in respect of the preferable treaty interpretation, but also in respect of whether the treaty in question does or does not “create domestically enforceable federal law.” Id.

36 For noteworthy examples of autonomous Supreme Court interpretations differing from the executive’s positions, see Perkins v. Elg, 307 U.S. 325 (1939); Valentine v. United States ex rel. Neidecker, 299 U.S. 5 (1936); and Hamdan v. Rumsfeld, 548 U.S. 557 (2006).

37 Medellín, supra note 18, at 513 n. 9 (citing Breard v. Greene, 523 U.S. 371, 375 (1998)); Sanchez-Llamas v. Oregon, 548 U.S. 331, 355–56 (2006).

38 April 2025 Statement, supra note 1, at 2. As noted above, see text at note 19 supra, the executive, legislative, and judicial branches have consistently treated the CPIUN as self-executing. When all three branches have converged on the same view that the treaty is directly applicable in U.S. law and requires absolute immunity, the judicial branch should continue to afford the absolute immunity that the treaty itself requires, rather than downgrading that immunity as a consequence of a shift in executive policy toward the UN body in question.

39 Certain Expenses of the United Nations, Advisory Opinion, 1962 ICJ Rep. 151 (July 20).

40 See Brzak v. United Nations, 597 F.3d 107, 112 (2d Cir. 2010); Georges v. United Nations, 84 F. Supp. 3d 246, 249 (S.D.N.Y. 2015) (holding that MINUSTAH, the UN peacekeeping mission in Haiti, “as a subsidiary body of the UN, is also immune from suit”); Georges, supra note 7, at 98 (affirming district court holding on absolute immunity and also finding that plaintiffs lacked standing to raise issue of material breach).

41 See Georges, supra note 40, at 246, aff’d Georges, supra note 7, at 88 (in suit involving UN peacekeepers in Haiti, absolute immunity upheld by both the district court and appellate court).

42 See Sadikoglu v. United Nations Development Programme, No. 11 Civ. 294 (PKC), 2011 WL 4953994 (S.D.N.Y. Oct. 14, 2011).

43 See Hunter v. United Nations, 800 N.Y.S. 2d 347, 2004 WL 3104829 (N.Y. Sup. Ct. 2004).

44 See Bisson v. United Nations, No. 06 Civ. 6352 (PAC) (AJP), 2007 WL 2154181 (S.D.N.Y. July 27, 2007).

45 See Shamsee v. Shamsee, 428 N.Y.S.2d 33 (App. Div. 1980).

46 For an illustrative listing of UN organs broken down into categories including “subsidiary bodies,” see John R. Crook, Contemporary Practice of the United States, 104 AJIL 489, 493–94 (2010) (UNRWA included in the same category of UN system organs as UNICEF, the UN Development Programme, and the World Food Programme, which, as noted in the text and notes 42–44, have already been held entitled to absolute UN immunity in U.S. courts).

47 The April 2025 statement discusses the above-cited cases, mainly to distinguish them on their facts, by pointing out allegedly determinative distinctions between the activities of the UN bodies previously held to be immune and UNRWA’s own activities. (No case to date has addressed UNRWA’s immunities.) However, the mode of analysis employed in the statement would apparently lead to the conclusions that these entities likewise may not qualify as “subsidiary organs” for the same Charter-based reasons asserted in respect of UNRWA, or, alternatively, that the president could revoke their previously-granted immunity if he found their activities problematic, in reliance on an IOIA provision that the president may “revoke” an organization’s designation for immunity purposes if he finds “in his judgment” that the organization or its officers and employees have abused their privileges and immunities. April 2025 statement, supra note 1, at 7. In respect of defendant Grandi, currently the UN High Commissioner for Refugees, the statement “does not presently take a position on whether UNHCR is a subsidiary organ of the UN.” Id. at 9 n. 7.

Postscript: On September 30, 2025, the United States District Court for the Southern District of New York granted the UN defendants’ motion to dismiss on grounds of immunity. Judge Analisa Torres held UNRWA to be a UN subsidiary organ entitled to absolute immunity under the CPIUN. Citing cases involving U.S. statements of interest in matters of treaty interpretation, she concluded that “the Court need not consider the Government’s changed position on UNRWA’s immunity where the ‘plain and unambiguous text of the CPIUN grants the U.N. [and its subsidiary organs] absolute immunity.’” Estate of Kedem Siman Tov v. UNRWA, 1:24-cv-04765-AT, Op. and Order, at 16 (Sept. 30, 2025).