North Korea is circumventing sanctions by the United Nations intended to choke the rogue regime, according to a report from the global organization.
The sanctions, approved by the United Nations in December 2017, were designed to cut North Korea’s oil imports and crack down on exports, among other penalties. But Pyongyang “continues to defy Security Council resolutions through a massive increase in illegal ship-to-ship transfers of petroleum products and coal,” a U.N. panel found.
The “violations render the latest United Nations sanctions ineffective by flouting the caps on the import of petroleum products and coal oil,” said the report, which noted such transfers have grown in “scope, scale and sophistication.”
According to Hugh Griffiths, the head of the U.N. Panel of Experts, the level of “spoofing” they witnessed is unprecedented. “They’re using more sophisticated methods. They’re becoming cleverer,” Griffiths told NBC News.
Examples found in the report include the hacking of foreign banks and North Korea flying flags from Panama, Sierra Leone, or Tanzania on their vessels.
“Commodity traders are unwitting actors, the banks are unwitting actors, the insurers are unwitting actors and that’s because they are not monitoring the ships that they are either financing, insuring or that are carrying their product,” Griffiths said.
The White House and the State Department did not respond to requests for comment from NBC News.
Late last month, President Trump walked away from a meeting with North Korean leader Kim Jong Un in Hanoi, Vietnam, dedicated to talks about denuclearization of the Korean peninsula. The two leaders previously met in June 2018 in Singapore on the issue.
White House national security adviser John Bolton said during an interview Sunday that he isn’t aware of any talks between the U.S. and North Korea since the Hanoi summit, but was confident that North Korea remains eager for the sanctions to be lifted.
“What North Korea needs, and it needs it very much right now, is economic relief,” Bolton said on ABC News. “I think it’s very much on Kim Jong Un’s mind. He wants the economic sanctions released. And to get that, he is prepared to give up some part of his nuclear program, perhaps at a declaratory level, even a substantial part.”
The U.N. panel, which publishes biannual reports on sanctions against North Korea, said the rogue regime’s nuclear and ballistic missiles “remain intact,” aligning with that of the U.S. intelligence community.
