China, Russia obstruct North Korea sanctions reporting: former UN panel coordinator

A former British member of a United Nations panel on North Korea criticized Chinese and Russian members of the group for stymieing biannual reporting on sanctions against Pyongyang at a Friday press briefing organized by media outlet NK Pro.

Eric Penton-Voak, a former British coordinator on the United Nations Panel of Experts on North Korea, speaks at a press briefing hosted by media outlet NK Pro in Jung District, central Seoul, on Friday morning. [YONHAP]

A former British member of a United Nations panel on North Korea criticized members of the group appointed by China and Russia for obstructing the panel's biannual reporting on sanctions against Pyongyang at a Friday press briefing in Seoul.

Speaking at a briefing hosted by media outlet NK Pro, Eric Penton-Voak, a former coordinator on the United Nations Panel of Experts on North Korea, said that “two colleagues act consistently in misusing the principle of consensus” that governs collective decision-making at the international body “to prevent the panel from reaching the conclusions that it should as an independent organization.”

The panel was established in 2009 by Security Council Resolution 1874 as an independent organization to help the Security Council’s sanctions committee on North Korea carry out its mandate of enforcing sanctions against Pyongyang’s illicit weapons programs.

Made up of experts from the five permanent members of the Security Council as well as South Korea and Japan, the panel’s main duties include gathering and analyzing information from countries regarding the implementation of sanctions, highlighting issues of non-compliance, making recommendations to improve implementation and submitting reports on its findings to the council twice annually.

The experts are formally obliged by their employment contracts with the United Nations to be impartial and independent.

But according to Penton-Voak, who served on the panel from May 2021 to this past April, the Chinese and Russian members “are obviously influenced by the views of their own capital cities” and work to prevent the panel from saying anything “that would not be acceptable” in Beijing or Moscow.

Past sanctions resolutions aimed at curbing North Korea’s weapons of mass destruction (WMD) programs were passed unanimously. However, the Security Council — which counts both China and Russia as well as the United States, Britain and France as veto-wielding permanent members — has passed no new sanctions against the North since 2017 amid escalating global tensions.

Penton-Voak noted the same deadlock at the Security Council now plagues the panel, with the result being that the panel’s upcoming report on sanctions against North Korea is an “inevitably and fundamentally diluted” document that “doesn’t say what it could and should.”

He also said that his Chinese and Russian colleagues on the panel often offered “no justification” for their objections to the inclusion of certain information in the group’s reports.

Although Penton-Voak acknowledged the panel’s report includes a “wealth of detail” regarding sanctions violations by individuals, companies and entities, he pointed out that the panel is being stymied from addressing strategic issues, including the finding that sanctions “are simply not being implemented by major states.”

Both China and Russia have been accused of condoning the North’s sanctions violations or actively breaching sanctions.

Penton-Voak said that Russian Defense Minister Sergei Shoigu and Chinese Communist Party Politburo member Li Hongzhong’s attendance at a military parade in Pyongyang last week, where the North openly displayed intercontinental ballistic missiles, “says everything” about the two countries’ attitude toward implementing sanctions against the regime’s WMD programs.

While Penton-Voak said he expected the Chinese and Russian members on the panel to continue to obstruct the group’s work, he said it was “not acceptable” for the United Nations to allow them to “act with impunity” by continuously breaching their obligations to be impartial experts.

“It’s not acceptable for an employer to not enforce employment contracts,” he said, adding that the international body should invoke breach of contract procedures against the Chinese and Russian panel members.

BY MICHAEL LEE [lee.junhyuk@joongang.co.kr]