President Trump reportedly will not nominate anyone to a United Nations committee on racial discrimination, despite blocking the renomination of former President Obama’s pick.
Citing an unidentified State Department official, Politico reported Saturday that the White House blocked the renomination of human rights lawyer Gay McDougall to the U.N. Committee on the Elimination of Racial Discrimination.
The official told the news outlet that the Trump administration did not nominate a replacement in time for the deadline, “[cementing] the narrative that the Americans just don’t care about these kinds of things anymore.”
{mosads}McDougall was elected to the body in 2015. She told Politico, “I regret that I’m not able to continue, and that was not of my choosing.”
An unidentified Trump administration official confirmed to Politico that the U.S. would not nominate a candidate for the committee but insisted the decision “in no way diminishes our global leadership on efforts to eliminate racial discrimination.”
The committee on racial discrimination, which meets three times a year, is responsible for monitoring a 1960s convention on eliminating global racial discrimination.
According to Politico, McDougall had been assured by State Department officials that she would be renominated to her post on the 18-person committee but that the White House reversed course without explanation days later. McDougall has been critical of Trump, but Politico noted that it is “not clear whether the White House was aware of those statements.”
The Hill has reached out to the State Department for comment.
The reported decision not to nominate anyone to the committee marks the president’s latest apparent rebuke of international bodies. Trump pulled the U.S. out of the U.N. Human Rights Council in June over what then-U.S. Ambassador to the U.N. Nikki Haley called the body’s “chronic anti-Israel bias.”