Iranian President Ebrahim Raisi is slated to travel to New York for the 77th session of the UN General Assembly in September, his first since he did not attend the event last year. 

In his weekly press conference on Tuesday, Iranian government spokesman Ali Bahadori Jahromi said that preliminary plans have been made for Raisi’s participation in the United Nations annual gathering. 

The UNGA 77 is scheduled to open on September 13 in New York, and the first day of the high-level General Debate will be on 20 September. On the agenda of this year’s event are a meeting to mark the commemoration of the 30th anniversary of the adoption of the Declaration on the Rights of Persons Belonging to National or Ethnic, Religious and Linguistic Minorities on September 21 and a plenary meeting to commemorate the International Day for the Total Elimination of Nuclear Weapons on September 26. 

Raisi – who is on the US and European sanctions list -- did not attend the high-level summit in the previous year, and only delivered a video speech. 

He is probably among the most controversial among the Islamic Republic presidents to attend the General Assembly as he was a member of a "death committee" that issued orders to kill political prisoners in 1988. A witness in the Swedish trial of Hamid Noury (Nouri), an ex-judicial official and jailor, over alleged involvement in Iran’s 1988 prison executions named Raisi as one of the officials directly involved in the massacre. 

Earlier in the year, prominent former UN officials called for a UN investigation into the 1988 "massacre" of political prisoners in Iran, including Raisi’s role, at that time.