U.N. Secretary-General Antonio Guterres on Wednesday announced the appointment of Michelle Bachelet, Chile’s twice-serving president who endured torture under the Pinochet regime, as the world body’s next human rights chief.

Bachelet, 66, is set to replace Zeid Ra’ad Al Hussein of Jordan, a sharp critic of U.S. President Donald Trump’s policies, who held the post of U.N. high commissioner for human rights since September 2014.

A two-time president who ranks among the world’s most powerful women in politics, Bachelet also served in 2010 as the first director of U.N. Women, the U.N. agency promoting gender equality worldwide.

Guterres informed the General Assembly of his decision in a letter Wednesday following consultations with the heads of regional groups at the United Nations, a U.N. statement said.

The 193-nation assembly will meet Friday to vote on the appointment, which is expected to win approval, diplomats said. Zeid is due to step down Aug. 31.

Bachelet will step into a position that has drawn much controversy under Zeid, who decided not to seek a second term after losing support from powerful countries including the United States and Russia.

Zeid last year compared Trump to a bus driver “careening down a mountain path,” engaged in “reckless driving” for his attacks on the media.

In an implicit swipe at Zeid, U.S. Ambassador Nikki Haley urged Bachelet “to avoid the failures of the past.”

“The U.N. has failed to adequately address major human rights crises in Iran, North Korea, Democratic Republic of the Congo, and elsewhere, or stop its chronic, disproportionate obsession with Israel.

“It is up to Ms. Bachelet to speak out against these failures rather than accept the status quo. We hope that she does,” Haley said in a statement.

With Zeid under fire for his blunt criticism of leaders, rights groups were concerned that Guterres would seek to appoint a less vocal human rights boss.

“If selected, Bachelet will be taking on one of the world’s most difficult jobs at a moment when human rights are under widespread attack,” said Human Rights Watch executive director Kenneth Roth.

“As a victim herself, she brings a unique perspective to the role on the importance of a vigorous defense of human rights. People worldwide will depend on her to be a public and forceful champion, especially where offenders are powerful.”

The daughter of a general who opposed Augusto Pinochet’s overthrow of president Salvador Allende, Bachelet was detained in 1975 and held for several weeks at the infamous Villa Grimaldi interrogation and torture center in Santiago.

“I was mainly tortured psychologically, and some beating, but they didn’t ‘grill’ me,” Bachelet said in an interview, using prisoners’ slang for electric shocks administered to detainees.

“I was lucky compared to so many others. Many of them died,” said Bachelet in the 2014 interview, one of the few times that she has discussed the ordeal.

The pediatrician and socialist who was Chile’s first woman to hold the presidency was in office from 2006 to 2010, and then again from 2014 to March this year.

Last year, Guterres named her as a member of a high-level panel on mediation that provides him with advice on peace efforts, describing her as a “long-time champion of women’s rights” with a “history of dynamic global leadership, highly-honed political skills and a recognized ability to create consensus.”

Born in Santiago, Bachelet was studying medicine when she was detained for several weeks. After her release, she went into exile with her mother to Australia before moving to East Germany.

Bachelet returned to Chile in 1979, but was prevented from working as a doctor for political reasons. She continued studying, specializing in pediatrics and public health.

After democracy was restored to Chile in 1990, she worked for the health ministry and in 2000 was appointed health minister, followed by defense minister four years later.

As president, Bachelet offered a dramatic break from Chile’s highly conservative political class. She reformed the pension system and improved health and social services, focusing on Chile’s working poor.

Bachelet’s father was a general in Chile’s air force, and her mother was an archaeologist. In 1973 her father was arrested for opposing the military coup that brought Pinochet to power and was tortured for several months before suffering a heart attack and dying in custody in 1974.

Bachelet, then a medical student at the University of Chile, was arrested (along with her mother) and sent to a secret prison, where she also was tortured. Released into exile in 1975, Bachelet lived in Australia before moving to East Germany, where she became active in socialist politics and studied at the Humboldt University of Berlin. In 1979 she returned to Chile and subsequently completed her medical degree.

Although Bachelet’s family history made it difficult for her to find employment in Pinochet’s Chile, eventually she joined a medical clinic that treated victims of torture. After Pinochet was ousted from power in 1990, she became active in politics, particularly in the medical and military fields. In 1994 she was appointed an adviser to Chile’s minister for health, and she subsequently studied military affairs at Chile’s National Academy of Strategy and Policy as well as the Inter-American Defense College in Washington, D.C. Bachelet also was elected to the central committee of the Socialist Party (Partido Socialista).

In 2000 Ricardo Lagos, the candidate of the Coalition of Parties for Democracy (CPD), a group of center and center-left parties, was inaugurated as Chile’s first socialist president since Salvador Allende in 1973, and Bachelet was appointed health minister. In 2002 she became the first woman to lead the Defense Ministry.

In 2005 Bachelet was selected by the CPD as its presidential candidate. Her campaign focused on meeting the needs of the country’s poor, reforming the pension system, promoting the rights of women, and recognizing constitutionally the rights of the indigenous Mapuche people.

She led the first round of voting in December 2005 but failed to receive a majority, which was required to win outright. In the runoff Jan. 15, 2006, she defeated the conservative candidate Sebastian Pinera, winning 53 percent of the vote, and she was sworn in as president in March.

Months after taking office, however, Bachelet faced domestic difficulties. Students who were dissatisfied with Chile’s public education system staged massive protests, and labor unrest resulted in demonstrations and a strike by copper miners.

Bachelet’s popularity fell sharply amid the series of problems, but it rebounded during the second half of her term, largely because of her economic policies.

Bachelet was also credited with reducing poverty and improving early childhood education.

Largely as a result of those successes, Bachelet found herself among the most popular presidents in Chilean history; however, the constitution prevented her from serving a consecutive term. In 2010, with the end of her term approaching, she oversaw relief efforts after a magnitude-8.8 earthquake struck Chile.

She was again the candidate of the center-left bloc in the 2013 Chilean presidential election.

In December Bachelet won a runoff decisively to become the first two-time president of Chile since the end of Pinochet’s rule. She took office in March 2014, promising to raise taxes on corporations, to reform education, to revise the constitution, and to advance both women’s and lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender (LGBT) rights, including the legalization of therapeutic abortions.

Bachelet’s administration moved ahead rapidly, introducing dozens of bills, including a tax-reform bill that increased the corporate tax rate from 20 percent to 27 percent and eliminated a large tax loophole, the so-called FUT, used by wealthy Chilean stockholders to shield corporate income from taxation.

Much of the anticipated increase in tax earnings was earmarked to finance Bachelet’s education-reform bill, which included state subsidies to make public higher education free for the poorest 70 percent of Chileans.(SD-Agencies)