U.S. Diplomats Walk Out on France at the U.N. Security Council and Say They Will Keep Doing It

United States diplomats walked out of a U.N. Security Council meeting on Russia's war against Ukraine on July 27, 2026, as France's delegation took the floor. After the walkout, Dan Negrea, an alternate U.S. representative, told the council that the U.S. delegation would keep walking out until France renounced its "condescending and disrespectful rhetoric." The dispute began two days earlier, after Washington joined Russia and North Korea in voting against a new four-year term for U.N. human rights chief Volker Turk. France's U.N. Mission in Geneva wrote that the United States was no longer a "beacon of human rights" and stood isolated alongside North Korea, Nicaragua, Mali and Russia; U.S. Ambassador Mike Waltz replied on X that France had backed a rights chief who "has been lecturing free, sovereign democracies." Turk was reappointed by the General Assembly 144-10 with 13 abstentions.

A U.S. delegation refusing to sit in the chamber while an allied permanent member speaks is an unusual step in a body where the United States has historically pressed others to remain at the table, and it makes a bilateral dispute over a personnel vote part of the Council's proceedings on Ukraine.

France's ambassador, Jerome Bonnafont, did not mention the walkout in his remarks. The administration has cut funding to U.N. agencies and withdrawn from dozens of U.N. entities since 2025.