(United Nations) The North Korean ambassador to the UN thanked Russia on Thursday for having provoked, through its veto in the Security Council, the dissolution of the UN sanctions monitoring system against Pyongyang.
North Korea “is greatly grateful for the Russian veto of the illegal resolution renewing the committee of experts” monitoring the sanctions, declared Kim Song from the podium of the General Assembly, welcoming an “independent exercise of the right to international justice and impartiality.
North Korea has been subject to UN Security Council sanctions linked to its nuclear program since 2006, reinforced several times in 2016 and 2017.
But since 2019, Russia and China, highlighting in particular the humanitarian situation of the North Korean population, have called for the reduction of these sanctions, which have no end date.
Having failed to win their case, the Russians targeted the committee of experts responsible for monitoring the application of these measures, a committee whose reports refer to.
They thus vetoed at the end of March a draft resolution extending the mandate of this committee by one year, provoking the anger of the West who accused Moscow of wanting to hide arms transfers from Pyongyang to Russia for its war. in Ukraine.
During a debate Thursday in the General Assembly, obligatory following any veto, the North Korean ambassador attacked the Americans.
This meeting “is an important opportunity to determine whether we allow the Security Council to be a tool of arbitrary US policy or whether we ensure that the Council, however belatedly, carries out its functions with justice and impartiality,” he said. he said, once again rejecting the sanctions imposed on his country.
Council resolutions sanctioning North Korea “are products of the United States’ hateful and hostile policy to trample on the sovereignty, right to development and existence” of North Korea, he said.