Eleven countries, including South Korea, the US and Japan, are launching a new joint mechanism to monitor North Korea sanctions violations, the South Korean Ministry of Foreign Affairs said yesterday.
The decision follows Russia’s decision to veto the renewal of a panel of UN experts monitoring international sanctions on North Korea in March, effectively ending official oversight of sanctions imposed for the North’s banned nuclear and weapons programs. Russia’s veto was met with great criticism, with the US calling it a “self-interested effort to bury the panel’s reporting on its own collusion” with North Korea.
Since then, Seoul and other countries have been working to apply different methods to continue sanctions monitoring, with the US ambassador to the UN saying they are exploring “some creative ways” and “out-of-the-box thinking” to ensure the continuation of monitoring activities.
Photo: EPA-EFE
Alongside South Korea, the US and Japan, eight other countries — France, the UK, Germany, Italy, the Netherlands, Canada, Australia and New Zealand — are to participate in the multilateral sanctions monitoring team (MSMT).
The MSMT is “aligned in our commitment to uphold international peace and security and to safeguard the global non-proliferation regime and address the threat arising from [North Korea’s] weapons of mass destruction and ballistic missile programs,” the countries said in a joint statement.
The MSMT would “monitor and report violations and evasions of the sanction measures” of the UN Security Council resolutions, it said.
“Our preference would have been to continue the previous regime,” US Deputy Secretary of State Kurt Campbell said in a joint news conference in Seoul yesterday.
“That avenue was prevented by Russian intransigence, so this is the approach that we’ve taken,” he added.
“This grouping of nations that are animated by common purpose has the potential to actually surpass some of the work and reporting that was done previously,” Campbell said.
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