Stood up and left: US staged a demarche against France in the UN Security Council
A diplomatic scandal flared up between Washington and Paris: American diplomats walked out of a UN Security Council meeting during a speech by their French counterpart.
The American delegation, led by Deputy U.S. Representative to the UN Dan Negrea, left the Security Council chamber when French Permanent Representative Jerome Bonnafon took the floor during a meeting on Ukraine, the Associated Press reported.
"I would like to note that there is one member of the Council who feigns righteous indignation and tries to lecture everyone else on any topic <...> whether it is the [Ukrainian] conflict we are discussing today or such topics unrelated to peace and security as human rights. That is why we walked out during France's speech," the American diplomat later explained.
He added that the United States has always stood shoulder to shoulder with France when its "freedom was under threat" and tolerated French posturing "out of a sense of camaraderie and mutual respect," but now that has come to an end.
These steps were in response to a statement by the French mission to the UN in Geneva, which said that the United States can no longer be seen as a "beacon of human rights."
"Today they [the United States] stand alongside North Korea, Nicaragua, Mali, and Russia, isolated. And the world no longer listens to them," French diplomats wrote, commenting on the results of a UN vote on the re-election of High Commissioner for Human Rights Volker Turk for a second term.
U.S. Representative to the UN Mike Waltz, in turn, accused Paris of "indulging some of the worst human rights violators."
The vote to extend Volker Turk's mandate until October 2030 was held on July 25 in the UN General Assembly. 144 countries voted in favor, including European Union member states; 13 abstained (including Belarus, Korea, and New Zealand); and 10 countries did not support Turk's candidacy (including Russia, the United States, Israel, and Argentina).
Source: Izvestia
