Report: The Trump Administration Is Withdrawing From the United Nations Human Rights Council [UPDATED]

Bloomberg reports that the Trump administration will announce its withdrawal from the United Nations Human Rights Council, citing “hypocrisy and criticized as biased against Israel.”

According to their sources, Secretary of State Mike Pompeo and U.S. Ambassador to the U.N., Nikki Haley, will announce the United States’ departure Tuesday at 5 p.m. While the United States has long threatened to leave this arm of the United Nations, its final straw may have been the council dunking on the Trump administration’s wildly inhumane child separation policy. Or this is, once again, the administration acting impulsively on its own tempers and whims. Or just John Bolton fulfilling a decade-long dream. Who the fuck knows.

From Bloomberg:

The 47-member council, based in Geneva and created in 2006, began its latest session on Monday with a broadside against President Donald Trump’s immigration policy by the UN’s high commissioner for human rights. He called the policy of separating children from parents crossing the southern border illegally “unconscionable.”

The U.S. withdrawal had been expected. National Security Adviser John Bolton opposed the body’s creation when he was U.S. ambassador to the UN in 2006. In a speech to the council last year, Haley called out the body for what she said was its “relentless, pathological campaign” against Israel. She has also called for ways to expel members of the council that have poor human rights records themselves.

“For our part, the United States will not sit quietly while this body, supposedly dedicated to human rights, continues to damage the cause of human rights,” Haley said at the time. “In the end, no speech and no structural reforms will save the members of the Human Rights Council from themselves.”

The United States lecturing about “the cause of human rights.” My god.

Update, 5:27: It’s official. Haley announced the United States’ departure from the UN Human Rights Council on Tuesday afternoon, calling the council a “protector of human rights abusers” and a “cesspool of political bias.”