GENEVA: The UN’s migration agency snubbed the Trump administration’s candidate to lead it on Friday, a major blow to US leadership of a body addressing one of the world’s most pressing issues and only the second time that it won’t be run by an American since 1951.

Diplomats who took part in the first three rounds of voting on Friday said that American Ken Isaacs was eliminated in the ongoing contest to elect the next director-general of the International Organisation of Migration. The race was so far led by Antonio Vitorino, a Portuguese Socialist, ahead of IOM deputy director-general Laura Thompson of Costa Rica.

The move marks a searing rejection of the US candidate just as the Trump administration has been retreating from or rebuffing international institutions including two others based in Geneva: Earlier this month, the United States pulled out of the UN’s Human Rights Council, and Trump has recently criticised the World Trade Organisation as “unfair” to the US.

“Yet another sign that US power, authority and prestige has been so dramatically diminished,” tweeted Keith Harper, who was the Obama administration’s ambassador to the rights council. The “IOM Director is seen as an ‘American seat’ and Trump was unable to place an American in it.” Isaacs’ candidacy had been clouded by US policies like travel bans and migrant family separations and his own comments that critics have called anti-Muslim. But few diplomats streaming out of a Geneva conference centre dared to offer an explanation about how an American was stripped of a post that the US has held a lock-hold on for decades.

One, Senegalese diplomat Youssoupha Ndiaye, simply spoke of the early result: “The American is out.” Two other diplomats confirmed that, as well as the two-person race remaining between Vitorino and Thompson, as delegates broke for lunch. The two spoke on condition of anonymity because they weren’t authorised to release the information publicly.

The winner, who will be determined by dues-paying, ballot-casting members among the 172 countries in the IOM, will succeed longtime US diplomat William Lacy Swing, who leaves in September. IOM officials declined to confirm the result until voting was finished.

Published in Dawn, June 30th, 2018