Human Rights Watch (HRW) and other NGOs banded together to block initiatives launched by the United States to reform the United Nations Human Rights Council (UNHRC), The New York Times reported Wednesday.

The report surfaced following a critical letter United States Ambassador to the United Nations Nikki Haley wrote to 18 organizations, including HRW, in which she charged that the groups “sought to undermine our attempts to improve the Human Rights Council.”

HRW, the Times reported, “was among the nongovernmental organizations that opposed Ms. Haley’s push for a General Assembly vote.”

In the letter, Haley asserted that the U.S. was attempting to fix two problems with the UNHRC, “(1) improving the quality of Council membership and (2) removing the anti-Israel bias from the Council’s agenda.” The second is a reference to the council’s Agenda Item 7, the only agenda item which singles out a single country. In this case it is Israel.

The ambassador also recounted that the United States had engaged with over 125 Member States to discuss reform of the UNHRC.

In May, the U.S. submitted a draft resolution to reform the UNHRC to “a small group of Member States for edits.” Haley wrote, “to this date, we have not received not one written edit from a single Member State.” The only responses the U.S. received were from Russia and China, as well as a joint letter from HRW and other NGOs, “all requesting the same thing — that Member States oppose our resolution and not engage on the text.”

Extraordinary letter from @nikkihaley to @hrw in which she seeks to hold us and other human rights groups responsible for the US withdrawal from the UN human rights council pic.twitter.com/V77IMSGHHb

— Iain Levine (@iainlevine) June 20, 2018

The New York Times report appears to confirm the particulars of Haley’s charges. The report doesn’t mention that HRW or any of the other NGOs suggested changes to improve the U.S. resolution.

HRW executive director Kenneth Roth said at the time of the creation of the council, “Under this new system countries with poor human rights records like Saudi Arabia will never have a seat on the council again.” Though the first of the reforms suggested by the U.S. is consistent with Roth’s statement, HRW said that it opposed the U.S. initiative because “it would have opened a Pandora’s box of even worse problems.”

[Photo: Ludovic Courtès / WikiCommons ]