Russia has stopped UN from monitoring North Korea sanctions. Who is watching Kim?

Western countries are trying to replace a UN body that monitors compliance with international sanctions on North Korea after it was disbanded earlier this month in a blow to global nuclear non-proliferation efforts.

The eight-member panel of experts was first appointed by then-UN secretary-general Ban Ki-moon in 2009 to document sanctions violations for the UN Security Council as it sought to convince North Korea to abandon its illicit nuclear weapons and ballistic missile development programmes.

But mounting tensions between western countries and North Korea’s allies Russia and China over the sanctions, which can only be lifted with the unanimous support of permanent Security Council members, came to a head in March when Moscow blocked an extension of the panel’s mandate.

That mandate expired on April 30, resulting in the body’s dissolution and hindering long-standing international efforts to restrict Pyongyang’s access to foreign finance, energy and technologies.

“The sanctions remain in place on paper, but Russia’s veto removes the UN Security Council’s one impartial source of information on who is breaching the sanctions and how,” said Maya Ungar, UN analyst at the International Crisis Group.

The UN Security Council first introduced sanctions on North Korea in October 2006, following the country’s first nuclear test. The body has tightened restrictions on Pyongyang eight more times over the ensuing decade. But as relations between the west and Russia and China deteriorated sharply in recent years, Moscow and Beijing have grown increasingly critical of the sanctions.

In March, the Financial Times reported that Russia had begun providing large-scale supplies of oil and petroleum products to North Korea, in apparent exchange for ballistic missiles and millions of artillery shells supplied by Pyongyang to Moscow for its war in Ukraine.

“Despite signing up to the sanctions, Russia never supported the work of the panel in any meaningful way,” said Eric Penton-Voak, a former British official who served as co-ordinator of the panel between 2021 and 2023.

“But with weapons being traded and Russian oil being imported into North Korea — all of it clearly visible from satellite imagery — the panel would have become an increasingly annoying presence, so Moscow dispensed with it.”

After the panel’s mandate expired, US ambassador to the UN Linda Thomas-Greenfield delivered a statement on behalf of 50 countries stressing the need for ongoing monitoring efforts.

“We must now consider how to continue access to this kind of objective, independent analysis in order to address [North Korea’s] unlawful WMD and ballistic missile advancements,” she said.

In a commentary issued after Moscow’s veto, Russian foreign ministry spokesperson Maria Zakharova argued the panel had become “an obedient tool of [North Korea’s] geopolitical rivals”.

One alternative under consideration by western countries, said Ungar, was establishing a new monitor under the auspices of the UN General Assembly, which unlike the Security Council would not be vulnerable to a Russian or Chinese veto.

“But it would raise tricky legal and budgetary questions, while a lot of General Assembly members inside and outside Asia would prefer to avoid getting into a fight involving the US and China,” she added.

Analysts noted that any new body would face opposition from Beijing, which has been angered by western military surveillance of seaborne trade with North Korea near Chinese airspace.

Earlier this month, a Chinese fighter jet dropped flares in front of an Australian helicopter patrolling the Yellow Sea to enforce the UN sanctions. Beijing has accused Canberra of using the sanctions as a pretext for spying on Chinese naval exercises.

Hugh Griffiths, a sanctions expert who served as co-ordinator of the panel between 2014 and 2019, said a monitoring mechanism would be “hugely improved” by operating outside the UN altogether.

“A new panel could be better resourced and equipped and made up of professional investigators rather than diplomats and academics,” said Griffiths, though he acknowledged that the authority of such a body could suffer without the UN’s imprimatur.

The UN Security Council’s investigations and pressure had persuaded countries including Namibia, Mozambique and Egypt to abandon co-operation with North Korea in the past, he noted.

“Some countries in the global south, particularly in Africa, might be less willing to co-operate with a body that doesn’t have that UN stamp on it, and that could give North Korea an opportunity to expand its global criminal financing operations,” he said.

Griffiths added that despite its limitations, the panel had some success in spreading awareness among the private sector of the risks of being associated with North Korean trade and financing.

“Our unpublicised interactions with banks, global commodity traders, insurance companies, container shipping lines, logistics and fast parcel operators did lead to important compliance changes,” said Griffiths. “We exposed a lot of bad guys.”

Some analysts argued that with the sanctions regime already in tatters, western countries should reconsider a strategy that has failed to halt Pyongyang’s nuclear weapons programme.

Penton-Voak said western countries needed to articulate a clearer rationale for maintaining the sanctions, though he added: “This was not a failure of the sanctions themselves, but a failure by Russia and China to implement measures they themselves voted for.”

“Are they punitive? Are they to prevent the proliferation of North Korea’s nuclear capabilities? Or are they to send a warning signal to others who might follow the same path?”