The United Nations General Assembly, in its seventy-eighth session held on Friday, May 21st, approved the proposal to upgrade the status of Palestinian autonomous organizations to “non-member observer state.” Spain, Ireland, and Slovenia have stated they will recognize such a state.
This resolution, passed with a decisive majority in Friday’s session of the General Assembly, grants the Palestinian overseeing government extensive participation rights in General Assembly sessions but does not grant it voting rights. The General Assembly, with its 193 member states, also called on the United Nations Security Council to consider full Palestinian membership in the United Nations.
Of the 193 countries in the General Assembly, 143 countries voted in favor of the resolution, and 9 countries, including the United States, voted against it. Additionally, 25 countries, including Germany, abstained from voting on this resolution.
Prior to this special session of the General Assembly, Josep Borrell, the EU’s Foreign Policy Chief, announced that Spain, Ireland, and Slovenia would “recognize the existence of a Palestinian state” on the first of June.
These three countries had previously announced their readiness to recognize a Palestinian state. The special session of the United Nations General Assembly voted on whether the Palestinian autonomous organizations have “sufficient capacity” to be recognized as a state.
Observers expected this proposal to be approved with a high vote in the upcoming session of the General Assembly.
The Palestinian autonomous organizations have been an observer member of the United Nations, but with the upgrade of their status, they will have privileges such as speaking rights at the UN and speaking on behalf of a regional group, allowing them to present draft resolutions and amendments alongside UN member states.
However, before the resolution was passed, the Israeli Kan network reported that, with the efforts of Gilad Erdan, Israel’s Ambassador to the United Nations, a clause granting Palestinian autonomous organizations the “right to vote” in UN meetings and other forums had been removed from the final version of the membership proposal.
The Palestinian delegation present at the UN on Thursday, May 20th, had described the acceptance of a resolution supporting the membership of the Palestinian state as “vital at the current sensitive juncture” for the benefit of the two-state solution and ending the Gaza war.
The approval of this draft in the General Assembly regarding the upgrade of the Palestinian autonomous organizations to the status of a state still lacks enforcement guarantee, and this authority is under the jurisdiction of the United Nations Security Council according to international laws.
The previous vote in the United Nations Security Council on Thursday, April 30th, faced opposition from the United States. At that time, France, China, and Russia, the three permanent members of the Security Council, as well as two US allies, Japan and South Korea, had given positive votes to the draft resolution.
In that vote, 12 members of the Security Council supported the draft resolution for the full membership of the Palestinian state in the United Nations, but Britain, a permanent member of the Security Council, and Switzerland, as a non-permanent member, abstained from voting on the resolution.
The resolution required the approval of at least 9 Security Council members and that none of the permanent members of the Security Council, including China, France, Russia, Britain, and the United States, veto it.
The Palestinian autonomous organizations had repeatedly demanded that their 2011 request for full membership in the United Nations be reconsidered.
Until the approval of the resolution at the May 21st session, the Palestinian autonomous organizations, like the Vatican, were observer members of the United Nations.
