NEW YORK — The United Nations General Assembly’s Fourth Committee passed its annual resolution on Western Sahara on Thursday, but not in the way diplomats had grown used to. For the first time since 2006, the text was not waved through by consensus. The United States asked, at the eleventh hour, for a recorded vote on all 23 draft resolutions before the committee that day, including measures that had always sailed through unopposed. Washington framed the move as part of a broader push to force votes across all six main committees of the General Assembly, rather than singling out the Western Sahara file.
When the ballots were counted, the outcome left little doubt about where the diplomatic weight now sits: 152 states voted in favor, Morocco among them, against just two opposed and seven abstentions. Diplomats in the room described the margin as further proof that positions sympathetic to the separatist movement are becoming increasingly marginal within the UN system.
Much of the resolution’s wording has stayed essentially unchanged for two decades, but one addition stands out. For the first time, the Fourth Committee’s text explicitly references Security Council Resolution 2797, adopted on October 31, 2025, which had already endorsed Morocco’s autonomy plan as the basis for a settlement under Moroccan sovereignty. The new text calls on Morocco, Algeria, Mauritania and the Polisario Front to negotiate in good faith under the UN Secretary-General’s Personal Envoy, and welcomes the parties’ willingness to keep talking without preconditions, pointing to the negotiating rounds already held in Washington and Madrid.
Moroccan officials, who welcomed the vote as another layer of international validation, were quick to note that the resolution changes nothing about the territory’s legal status, since the text operates under Chapter VI of the UN Charter, the section governing peaceful settlement of disputes. For Rabat, the real significance lies elsewhere: Resolution 2797 is now cementing itself as the reference point for every subsequent UN discussion of the Sahara dispute, whether at the Security Council or the General Assembly.
The vote lands just days after Personal Envoy Staffan de Mistura told the Security Council that talks remain deadlocked, a stalemate he attributed largely to the Polisario’s reluctance to engage seriously with the specifics of an autonomy arrangement. A majority this lopsided adds fresh pressure on the separatist movement as the Security Council prepares to revisit the file in the coming weeks.
