Envoy says US and allies are mulling options ‘both inside and outside the UN’ to monitor North Korea

Seoul, South Korea — The United States and its allies are discussing options “both within and outside the UN system” to create a new mechanism for monitoring North Korea’s nuclear weapons program, the US ambassador to the United Nations said on Wednesday.

Russia vetoed a U.N. resolution last month that effectively abolished U.N. experts’ oversight of Security Council sanctions on North Korea. This led to Western accusations that Moscow was acting to shield its arms purchases from North Korea in order to fuel the war in Ukraine.

“I look forward to working with both the Republic of Korea and Japan, as well as like-minded countries, to try to develop options both within the UN and outside the UN. The point here is that we cannot allow the work that the panel of experts was doing to lapse,” US Ambassador Linda Thomas-Greenfield told a news conference in Seoul, using the formal name for South Korea.

Thomas-Greenfield did not provide specific details about U.S. discussions with allies and other partners, including whether an alternative monitoring regime would be more likely to be established through the U.N. General Assembly or with an independent entity outside the U.N.

Thomas-Greenfield met with South Korean Foreign Minister Cho Tae-yul on Monday and they discussed unspecified “next steps to ensure continued independent and accurate reporting” of North Korea’s illegal weapons development activities, according to her office.

Thomas-Greenfield said it was clear that Russia and China, which abstained from voting on the U.N. resolution that Moscow vetoed, will continue to try to undermine international efforts to monitor U.N. sanctions on North Korea to block. She criticized Russia for violating these sanctions with its alleged arms purchases from North Korea, and China for shielding the North from liability.

Moscow and Beijing have thwarted US-led efforts to tighten UN sanctions on North Korea over stepped-up ballistic missile tests since 2022, underscoring a rift between permanent Security Council members widened by Russia’s war on Ukraine.

“I don’t expect them to cooperate or agree with the efforts we’re making to find another path, but that won’t stop us from continuing to find that path,” Thomas-Greenfield said.

Thomas-Greenfield also briefly addressed questions about tensions in the Middle East. When asked about the Palestinian Authority’s request for full UN membership, she said a UN resolution supporting that request would not help find a two-state solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.

“President Biden has said categorically that we support a two-state solution to address the situation in the Middle East, where Palestinians will have their own state and Israel is secure in their state. that place as soon as possible,” she said.

“We don’t see that introducing a resolution in the Security Council will necessarily get us to a point where we can find a … two-state solution,” she added.

The Security Council imposed sanctions after North Korea’s first nuclear test explosion in 2006 and has tightened them over the years in a total of 10 resolutions that have so far tried unsuccessfully to cut funding and curb its nuclear and missile programs . The last sanction resolution was adopted by the council in December 2017.

The Security Council set up a committee to monitor sanctions, and the mandate of the panel of experts to investigate violations was extended for 14 years until last month.

Russia’s UN Ambassador Vassily Nebenzia told the Security Council before last month’s vote that Western countries are trying to “strangle” North Korea and that sanctions are losing their “relevance” in preventing the North’s proliferation of nuclear weapons.

In its latest report distributed last month, the panel of experts said it is investigating 58 suspected North Korean cyberattacks between 2017 and 2023, worth about $3 billion, with the money reportedly used to aid weapons development finance.