The Biden administration’s top diplomat to the United Nations accused fellow members of the Security Council on Friday of blocking U.S. efforts to impose sanctions against a former senator and head of the Haitian Senate who is accused of financing armed gangs.

The politician, former Senate president Youri Latortue, “exerts considerable control over political and economic life in the Artibonite department including through the use of violent gangs, which he has been financing and arming,” said Linda Thomas-Greenfield, the U.S. ambassador to the U.N. , citing a report from a Haiti panel of experts.

The panel was put in place by the U.N. in October 2022 after the Security Council unanimously approved sanctions for Haiti, the first authorization since 2017, and the first for a country in the Western Hemisphere. The panel’s job is to make recommendations, based on its investigations, on people who should be sanctioned because they pose a threat to Haiti’s peace and stability. U.N. sanctions are among the most stringent of punishments, and would freeze a person’s assets while barring them from traveling to most countries around the world.

So far, the U.N. has imposed sanctions on just five gang leaders, which has led to criticism about the effectiveness of the measure because the gang chiefs usually do not keep their money in banks and do not have visas to travel to other countries. The U.S., along with France have pushed for the inclusion of both gang leaders and politicians on the list, which the expert panel has proposed.

“We were deeply disappointed by the unexplained hold placed on Youri Latortue,” Thomas-Greenfield said about the prominent Haitian politician. “We urge the hold to be lifted expediently.”

Thomas-Greenfield’s comments came after all 15 members of the Security Council voted unanimously to renew the mandate of the U.N. political office in Haiti for another year. The resolution, penned by the U.S. and Ecuador, tasks the U.N. Integrated Office, known by its French acronym BINUH, with overseeing the success of the new political transition in Haiti as well as the Kenya-led Multinational Security Support Mission, MSS.

The renewal is “a much-needed victory for the people of Haiti” who have lived for far too long in crisis, she said, adding that the U.N. political office will play a key role in supporting a democratic transition in Haiti, which hasn’t had elections since 2016.

“There is a clear and direct link between the success of BINUH and that of the MSS. If the MSS mission can succeed in supporting the Haitian national police and improve Haiti’s security environment, BINUH will be better able to implement its mandate and make a positive impact on Haiti’s future,” she said.

But the Security Council, Thomas Greenfield added, must do more to promote accountability by considering sanctions on individuals and entities responsible for or complicit in actions that threaten peace and freedom in Haiti.

In his latest report to the Security Council on Haiti, Secretary General António Guterres stressed that Haiti continues to be plagued by alarming levels of violence. The number of intentional homicides has risen significantly, with his office in Port-au-Prince recording 3,252 between January and May, compared with 2,453 in the previous five-month period. The number of kidnappings was 971 during the first five months of this year.

Guterres’ special representative to Haiti, María Isabel Salvador, told the council ahead of Friday’s vote that indiscriminate gang violence has been spreading beyond Port-au-Prince to the Artibonite region and other parts of the country. She said the recurrent attacks since Feb. 29 continue to hamper efforts to beef up the police to deal with the security challenges, and she called on the council to issue sanctions against those in Haiti backing armed groups.

“Across the country, gangs have carried out unthinkable atrocities, killings, mass rapes, kidnappings, forced recruitment, exploitation and trafficking in children. Nearly 5 million people are grappling with severe food insecurity; food, water, medicine and other essentials are in short supply,” Thomas-Greenfield later told the media after the vote. “People are living in need and in fear, and they deserve better.”

Noting that the U.S. remains committed to ensuring the success of the armed multinational security mission mission following the deployment of the first 200 Kenyan police officers last month, Thomas-Greenfield stressed that “more needs to be done to ensure accountability for atrocities including through sanctions to stem the flow of arms and enforce the arms embargo to create durable political solutions.”

Thomas-Greenfield’s comments about sanctions and Latortue are likely to reverberate in Haiti, where observers have questioned whether the U.S. and other countries are still committed to pursuing sanctions following an initial aggressive campaign targeting designated members of the political and economic elite..

A longtime politician who once served as an adviser to former President Michel Martelly, Latortue was one of the country’s most powerful politicians when he was in office. Today, he’s among a handful of Haitian politicians who have been blacklisted by the U.S. Treasury Department’s Office of Foreign Assets Control and the Canadian government.

He has denied all allegations against him and hired a lawyer to fight the designation, which freezes any assets he has in the U.S. and Canada.

Thomas-Greenfield’s unusual admission are the first public acknowledgment of an effort by the U.S. and others at the Security Council to impose sanctions against Latortue and other powerful politicians in Haiti, and is a window into the divisions on the council over who should be sanctioned.

Though no one admitted publicly to blocking the sanctions against Latortue, the representative of the Russian Federation, which is serving as president of the council this month, alluded to the friction in his comments.

Dmitry Polyanskiy, Russia’s first deputy permanent representative at the U.N., said that when it comes to sanctions, he hopes “the interests of individual members of the council will not be placed higher than the task of supporting an inclusive political dialogue.”

Though Russia signaled last week that it had no problems with sanctioning individuals other than gang leaders in Haiti, as long as the evidence supports the demand, the country has gone on record accusing both the U.S. and Canada of using sanctions to clear the political field in Haiti.

Polyanskiy’s comments reflect a wider debate in the international community about how best to address Haiti’s multidimensional crisis and whether those believed to be behind the instability should be given a seat at the table or punished.

It’s an issue even the U.S. doesn’t appear to handle consistently. Haitian politicians were recently invited to a reception at the U.S. Embassy in Haiti last week, and though none of the invitees had been sanctioned by the Treasury Department, at least one had had his U.S. visa revoked.