Smoke 'em if you got 'em

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NEW YORK -- The United Nations is perhaps the last public space in New York where one can light up a Camel over coffee, or even a Cuban cigar after lunch. And diplomats from a dozen foreign nations are working to keep it that way.

Earlier this year, New York City passed one of the most restrictive smoking laws in the country. But the statute has done nothing to stop diplomats from lighting up in the delegates' bar and coffee lounges at the U.N. headquarters building, and New York authorities have no jurisdiction to stop them.

U.N. Secretary-General Kofi Annan has tried on his own to ban cigarettes inside the Secretariat building on First Avenue, succeeding mainly in prompting hours of debate in General Assembly committees and lending a defiant pleasure to each strike of the match.

When diplomats protested that only the General Assembly, not Mr. Annan, could outlaw cigarettes, the U.N. legal advisers were called in to study the matter.

The smokers' revolt -- which an embarrassed senior U.N. official acknowledges is "petty but compelling," has cast a spotlight upon the peculiar legal status of the organization's six riverfront acres and those who work there.

Legal adviser Bruce Rachkow told the U.N. legal committee last week that under a 1946 "headquarters agreement" between the United States and the United Nations, U.S. federal, state and local laws are binding at the United Nations except where the agreement specifies otherwise.

"Thus ... the recently enacted New York State and New York City laws prohibiting smoking in public places are fully applicable to the headquarters premises," he said.

While committing the organization's intent to abide by local laws, however, the 15-page headquarters agreement also says the headquarters compound is "inviolable" and that law officers will not enter without the consent of the secretary-general or his staff.

Furthermore, Mr. Rachkow said, the delegates have diplomatic immunity, which protects them from prosecution under the city's smoking law.