The Emirati diplomat and minister Lana Nusseibeh has emerged as a late contender in the contest for the next UN secretary-general.
The UAE announced her last-minute candidacy earlier this month, amid a stalemate to choose a successor to Portuguese incumbent Antonio Guterres, whose 10-year term ends on 31 December.
The successful candidate is usually selected by the 15-member UN Security Council (UNSC), before the recommendation is rubber-stamped by the wider UN General Assembly (UNGA). Traditionally the role rotates between continents: many believe that a female diplomat from Latin America should occupy the position.
No clear consensus has emerged from the UNSC after six anonymous straw polls, with all candidates so far facing opposition from the veto-wielding permanent members, namely the US, UK, France, Russia and China.
While political power in the UN is primarily held by the UNSC and the UNGA, the secretary-general has an important administrative and agenda-setting role and is the public face of the organisation.
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But the candidacy of Nusseibeh, a top minister in the UAE’s foreign office and a former Emirati ambassador to the UN, has been criticised.
As the Emirate’s UN representative, she has consistently denied it is involved in Sudan’s ongoing civil war, despite considerable evidence of the UAE backing the Rapid Support Forces (RSF), a paramilitary group accused of war crimes and other atrocities.
Questions have also been raised about the UAE’s relationship with Israel, which has killed at least 74,000 Palestinians in Gaza since October 2023 in what leading human rights organisations and a UN commission have referred to as genocide.
Here’s what you need to know about Nusseibeh, her involvement in major Middle East issues and what her leadership of the UN could mean.
Nusseibeh’s early life
Lana Nusseibeh, who was born in 1978 in Abu Dhabi, is a member of a prominent, aristocratic family from Jerusalem that has been politically active for decades.
Her grandfather, Anwar Nusseibeh, who lost a leg during the Nakba, held ministerial roles in Jordan in the 1950s when it controlled the West Bank and East Jerusalem. Sari Nusseibeh, her uncle, is a prominent Palestinian intellectual who was an aide to Yasser Arafat during the early 2000s.
In 1967, her father, Zaki Nusseibeh, settled in Abu Dhabi amid the 1967 Middle East War. Then in his twenties, he was an interpreter for Sheikh Zayed, the UAE’s founding father. He has remained in Abu Dhabi’s upper echelons since, serving as a foreign affairs minister from 2017 to 2021.
Lana Nusseibeh attended first the British School al Khubairat in Abu Dhabi and later Wycombe Abbey, a private girl’s school in High Wycombe, north-west of London.
She then studied history at Queen’s College, Cambridge and a master’s in Israeli and Jewish Diaspora Studies at the School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London, graduating in 2003. She speaks English, French and Hebrew besides Arabic.
What’s been Nusseibeh’s career path?
Nusseibeh joined the UAE’s ministry of foreign affairs in 2006, after consulting for Unesco and the Gulf Research Centre think tank.
She led its policy planning department from 2010 to September 2013, when the UAE cracked down on dissent amid the Arab Spring and was accused of supporting the military overthrow of Egyptian president Mohamed Morsi in July 2013. She was the UAE’s permanent representative to the UN from 2013 until April 2024.
Nusseibeh’s official platform as to what she would do if she became secretary general is vague - not unusual, given the complex diplomacy that candidates must navigate to successfully secure the top job. She says that her priorities as secretary-general would be to “act earlier, bridge divides and pursue practical first agreements”, and to “protect essential aid while helping countries mobilise investment, address debt and shape their own development”.
She also discusses defending the UN charter, international law and universal human rights, “consistently and without double standards”.
Critics of Nusseibeh’s candidacy have pointed to the UAE’s human rights record, including accusations of unfair detention, torture, and widespread exploitation of migrant workers.
What has Nusseibeh said about Sudan?
Nusseibeh’s UN tenure overlapped with a period when the UAE developed a far more assertive foreign policy, supporting warring parties in civil conflicts from Libya to Yemen.
The UAE’s role in Sudan, which is subject to a UN arms embargo, has attracted especial attention, with rights organisations and UN investigators criticising its backing for the RSF, which the UN says has committed atrocities that bear the “hallmarks of genocide”.
In April 2024, Nusseibeh told the UN Security Council that such allegations were “spurious, unfounded, and lack[ing] any credible evidence”.
Her letter described Sudanese concerns about Emirati involvement in the conflict as “nothing more than an attempt to divert attention”, and added that the UAE was “profoundly concerned about the dissemination of disinformation and false narratives”.
Nusseibeh has continued to defend UAE policy in Sudan since she left her ambassadorial job the same month to become the UAE’s Assistant Minister for Political Affairs and Envoy of the Minister of Foreign Affairs.
Asked by CNN in July 2024 if she rejected UN investigators’ findings of “credible” evidence of Emirati support for the RSF, Nusseibeh said: “Absolutely”, adding that such allegations were “categorically untrue”.
And in November 2025, Nusseibeh travelled to Strasbourg to lobby the European Parliament to remove references to the UAE’s role in Sudan from an EU resolution condemning atrocities. The UAE was not mentioned in the final resolution.
In a statement to Middle East Eye, Sudan’s UN mission accused Nusseibeh of “defending and whitewashing her country’s record of troubling the peace of Sudan by enabling genocide, enslaving our women and girls and instigating sexual violence and other atrocities, in addition to destabilising our sovereignty.
“The UAE must face accountability, not to be rewarded with the top global leadership role of the UN.”
As secretary general, Nusseibeh would be bound by the UN Charter to act independently of all governments, including Abu Dhabi.
But Ammar Mahmoud, a top Sudanese diplomat at the UN, said her outright rejection of the UN investigators' findings on Emirati involvement signalled she would not undertake the role with due impartiality.
"I highly doubt that she will ever form any investigative committees about the UAE’s role in Sudan,” Ammar Mahmoud, a top Sudanese diplomat at the UN, told Middle East Eye.
“Nor do I think that she will accurately reflect, in her engagements with world leaders as secretary-general, the true nature of the conflict in Sudan and her country’s role in it.”
What has Nusseibeh said about Israel and Gaza?
Mediating the Israel-Palestine conflict would be an immediate demand on the next secretary general. But Nusseibeh faces questions about her willingness to hold Israeli leaders to account for alleged war crimes committed in Gaza.
Although the UAE has repeatedly voted against Israel at the UNGA, Abu Dhabi and Israel have had strong relations since they signed the US-brokered Abraham Accords in 2020, a landmark deal championed by Nusseibeh that ended decades of diplomatic boycott.
Last week, Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu gave a security presentation outlining an “Israel-UAE Hexagon Alliance”, which also appeared to name Sudan’s RSF as a “friendly” party.
Abu Dhabi’s official position is to call for self-determination for Palestinians via the two-state solution, although this has long been rejected by Israel. Nusseibeh said in September 2025 that Israel’s formal annexation of the West Bank would be a “red line” for the UAE. She has also promoted the UAE’s role in providing aid to the besieged Gaza Strip.
But diplomats who have worked with Nusseibeh suggest that the Emirate’s stance on Israel is closer than official statements might suggest. “The UAE is totally aligned with Israel”, a European official who sat in on a diplomatic meeting between Nusseibeh and her US counterparts in the summer of 2026 told Middle East Eye, adding that there appeared to be “no limits” to the states’ relationship.
What else has Nusseibeh and the UAE said about the Middle East?
Libya: The UAE has been implicated in war crimes in Libya, where it is accused of backing Khalifa Haftar, whose Libyan Arab Armed Forces controls swathes of the country’s east.
In 2015, leaked internal Emirati emails revealed that the UAE was secretly shipping weapons to its allies in Libya despite a UN arms embargo. The emails included messages sent directly to Nusseibeh, which critics said showed that she had explicit knowledge of the arms transfers.
UN investigators later found that the UAE, along with Turkey and Jordan, had systematically violated the arms embargo. Nusseibeh refused to comment.
Gulf states: Nusseibeh was at the centre of a diplomatic crisis when, in June 2017, the UAE, along with Saudi Arabia, Bahrain and Egypt, cut ties with Qatar over Doha’s alleged support for “terrorism”.
The crisis escalated to an effective blockade of Qatar’s land and sea borders. At the UN, Nusseibeh rallied support for the blockade, describing the measures in 2017 as “entirely legal, justified and proportionate”. Relations between Qatar and the UAE have since impoved.
Yemen: The UAE backs the Southern Transitional Council (STC), a secessionist movement that wants independence for parts of southern Yemen amid Houthi control of the north.
This support caused another diplomatic crisis earlier this year, when the STC’s failed push to expand its territorial control prompted a major fallout between Abu Dhabi and Saudi Arabia, which opposes the break-up of Yemen. Saudi Arabia, along with the rest of the GCC, has nonetheless backed Nusseibeh’s candidacy.
Somaliland: Nusseibeh’s campaign has been endorsed by the breakaway territory from Somalia that is recognised only by Israel. The UAE has fostered strong, informal ties with Somaliland, where it has built military bases and port infrastructure.
The territory wants to join the UN: the secretary-general can push for the admission of new members, although final authority rests with the Security Council and the UNGA. Nusseibeh is yet to give her stance.
Western Sahara: At the UNGA in 2025, Nusseibeh offered the UAE’s “full support for Moroccan sovereignty over the Moroccan Sahara”.
Morocco claims sovereignty over the region, which is recognised by the UN as a non-self-governing territory given the competing claims of the indigenous Sahrawi people, led by the Polisario Front.
Nusseibeh has said that the UAE endorses “the Autonomy Initiative within the framework of Moroccan territorial integrity”, which would grant Western Sahara limited self-government under Moroccan control. The plan is backed by the UK, US and France, but opposed by neighbouring Algeria, which cut ties with the UAE in September.
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