A question of legitimacy surrounds a new body created to monitor the enforcement of sanctions on North Korea in the absence of a U.N. experts panel with authority to track Pyongyang's expanding illegal military transfers to Moscow.
The United States, South Korea and Japan announced the formation of a Multilateral Sanctions Monitoring Team (MSMT) on North Korea as an alternative to the dissolved U.N. panel of experts that had monitored sanctions enforcement until April.
The announcement was made at a news conference Wednesday in Seoul, while U.S. Deputy Secretary of State Kurt Campbell was in the country to meet his South Korean and Japanese counterparts.
"The goal of the new mechanism is to assist the full implementation of U.N. sanctions on the DPRK by publishing information based on rigorous inquiry into sanctions violations and evasion attempts," said a joint statement released by 11 nations, including the U.S., South Korea and Japan.
The other eight countries are Australia, Canada, France, Germany, Italy, the Netherlands, New Zealand and the United Kingdom. DPRK stands for the Democratic People's Republic of Korea, North Korea's formal name.
Diminished legitimacy
Members of the former U.N. panel of experts said the new mechanism could function effectively but might be hurt by the lack of a United Nations mandate.
"This new organization will ultimately suffer from legitimacy problems," although it is an important step in reestablishing reliable reporting around North Korea's sanctions evasion activities, said Aaron Arnold, who served on the U.N. panel of experts from 2019 to 2021.
"Because it is not operating under a [U.N. Security Council] resolution mandate, it will lack credibility in the eyes of many states. Unfortunately, it's more likely that it will be those states that are most at risk for being exposed to North Korea's sanctions evasion and proliferation-related activities," said Arnold, currently a senior associate fellow at the Royal United Services Institute.
China and Russia, two of the five veto-wielding Security Council permanent members, will not participate in the newly formed team. It was Russia's veto that blocked an extension of the U.N. monitoring regime that had been created in 2009.
Since then, the eight-member panel had produced biannual reports on North Korea's violations of sanctions, which had been imposed by the Security Council in a bid to curb the country's nuclear and missile programs.
Alastair Morgan, a former expert on the U.N. panel and the British ambassador to North Korea from 2015 to 2018, said the newly formed team should be effective in producing reports like the ones issued by the former panel.
The existing sanctions on North Korea also remain in force, he said. But because the new team will operate outside the U.N., any findings or recommendations "will not be implemented" by the Security Council.
Morgan added that since the council "had not acted on any panel recommendations for designations since 2018, that may not make a substantive difference."
The launch of the MSMT comes as North Korea is ratcheting up its military support to aid Russia in its war against Ukraine.
Washington, Seoul and Tokyo, in a separate joint statement on Wednesday, expressed "grave concern over deepening military cooperation between the DPRK and Russia, including arms transfers" in violation of U.N. Security Council resolutions.
Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy alleged at a press conference in Brussels on Thursday that North Korea was training "about 10,000 soldiers" to join Russia in its war on Ukraine.
Second-best solution
George Lopez, who served on the U.N. panel of experts from 2010 to 2011 and again from 2022 to 2023, said, "Russia and China will claim this new team is illegitimate" because they have increasingly "decided recently that these sanctions were unfair and illegitimate."
He said the new team is "a second-best solution" because the Security Council failed to create an alternative within the U.N. framework.
The new team can earn legitimacy by "generating high-quality and transparent reports," which the 11 countries are capable of producing, Lopez said.
Li Pengyu, a spokesperson for the Chinese Embassy in Washington, told VOA on Wednesday that sanctions will not deter North Korea from disengaging in provocative actions.
"Facts have repeatedly proved that resorting to sanctions and pressure will not resolve the peninsula issue but will only further escalate tensions and not be consistent with the interests of any party," he said.
In July, the Group of Seven leading industrialized nations, the European Union and three other countries sent a letter to China's U.N. Ambassador Zhang Jun accusing Beijing of helping North Korea evade sanctions. China responded that it strictly implements U.N. sanctions.
Katsuhisa Furukawa, who served as a U.N. panel expert from 2011 to 2016, said the MSMT should have significant ability to enforce sanctions in addition to its monitoring function.
"Although this new multilateral mechanism will not have legally binding power over all U.N. Member States, it will still be able to have considerable law enforcement power across the globe so long as the U.S., Europe, Japan, ROK, Australia, and possibly Singapore, join," Furukawa said.
"Even if the non-member governments do not cooperate with the new multilateral organization, the financial institutions in these countries will not be able to ignore the requests from this new multilateral organization because, otherwise, these financial institutions could be sanctioned by the U.S., EU, Japan, etc.," he continued.
It is important to remember that the U.N. resolutions that give member states the authority to act "are still in effect, and Russia and China can't repeal them," said Joshua Stanton, a Washington-based lawyer who helped draft the North Korea Sanctions and Policy Enforcement Act of 2016.
