The Unbearable Lightness of UN Sanctions on North Korea

As far as President Obama has any discernible policy for dealing with the rising threat from North Korea, a big part of his approach entails pressuring Pyongyang with UN sanctions. So say U.S. administration officials such as the State Department’s special representative for North Korea policy, Sung Kim, who testified to Congress last week that “the sanctions we have successfully pushed for in the UN Security Council give countries the authority they need to crack down on North Korea’s proliferation networks.”

But for sanctions to make a difference, it is not enough to have the UN’s blessing. The UN leaves it to individual member states to develop and police their own plans for putting UN sanctions into practice. And according to the UN’s own records, almost half the UN’s 193 member states have done nothing to implement these North Korea sanctions of which the Obama administration is so proud. Among the derelicts are a number of countries tasked at the UN with monitoring the sanctions in question. This is a big problem, about which the administration appears to be doing far too little.

Some quick background: Since 2006, the UN Security Council has passed four binding sanctions resolutions on North Korea, in response to Pyongyang’s ballistic missile launches and to its three nuclear tests — carried out in 2006, 2009 and 2013. To oversee these sanctions, the Security Council in 2006 set up a North Korea sanctions committee, which consists of the same 15 states that sit on the Security Council. To help the Committee do its job, the UN also set up an international Panel of Experts. This panel currently has eight members, who track cases of non-compliance, make recommendations to the North Korea sanctions committee, and produce periodic reports.

To put some muscle into this process, all UN member states are supposed to provide the sanctions committee with “implementation reports,” detailing the concrete steps they have taken to translate UN from words into action. Officially, these reports are not optional. They are required, as spelled out on March 7, 2013, in UN Resolution 2094, which was passed by the Security Council shortly after North Korea’s third nuclear test. This resolution included a call for all states to submit their implementation reports within 90 days.

But no such luck. That’s no surprise, because there is no UN penalty for states that ignore the rules. Two of North Korea’s favorite partners in proliferation, for instance, Iran and Syria, have filed no reports, nor are they likely to, nor will they pay any price for failing to do so. In October, 2013 — some four months after the deadline– the North Korea sanctions committee issued a reminder to UN member states, urging them to comply with the rules. The committee further reminded the UN community that some states had yet to submit implementation reports for earlier sanctions resolutions on North Korea, passed in 2006 and 2009.

Today, more than two years after that reminder, UN records show that only 99 of the UN’s 193 members have submitted any reports at all. Of the reports submitted, most cover nothing beyond 2009, or at most, 2012. Only 37 countries have submitted implementation reports covering the sanctions passed in 2013. In other words, excluding North Korea itself, there are 93 countries that have submitted no plans at all for enforcing these sanctions. And there are 155 countries that have failed to provide the UN with their plans for complying with the most recent, 2013 round of UN sanctions on North Korea.

The news gets worse, as noted by a former member of the UN Panel of Experts on North Korea sanctions, William Newcomb. Speaking Tuesday at a conference on North Korea hosted in Washington at the Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies, Newcomb noted that among the delinquents are four countries that currently sit on the Security Council, which means they are also on the North Korea sanctions committee — where they have failed to comply with the UN reporting rules that they themselves are tasked to oversee. “Implementation is a major problem,” said Newcomb.

The four laggard countries are Angola, Chad, Malaysia and Venezuela. They are all nonpermanent members of the Security Council, which means they are serving two-year terms as part of the contingent of 10 rotating seats. Chad will rotate off the Council at the end of this year. But next year another non-reporting country, Senegal, will join the Security Council, and, by extension, the North Korea sanctions committee. So will two countries whose reports are not fully up to date, Egypt and Ukraine.

Not that a country’s promptness in providing a sanctions implementation plan to the UN will tell you all you need to know. All five permanent members of the Security Council — France, Britain, the U.S., China and Russia — are up to date in their reports. Nonetheless, in the matter of enforcing sanctions on North Korea, the U.S., France and Britain have shown far more diligence than Russia or China (a few years ago, for instance, China sold North Korea the vehicles for its road-mobile KN-08 ballistic missiles). And then there’s the contrarian case of Panama, which has not updated its implementation reports to the UN since 2011. Nonetheless, in July, 2013 Panama made headlines with the seizure of a North Korean freighter, the Chong Chon Gang, which was violating UN sanctions by smuggling arms from Cuba.

By and large, however, it is a bad sign when UN member states, especially those on the North Korea sanctions committee itself, fail to provide implementation plans. At the very least, it sends a message to the world at large, and especially to North Korea itself, that these UN sanctions are profoundly unserious. This past February, in a report to the North Korea sanctions committee, the UN Panel of Experts noted the “inaction and low reporting levels” of member states. Referring to UN sanctions, the Panel added: “The resolutions provide Member States with tools to curb the prohibited programmes of the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea, but are effective only when implemented.”

Sanctions have so far failed to stop North Korea’s nuclear and ballistic missile programs, failed to stop its arms smuggling, and failed to produce any visible moderating influence on the barbarities of North Korea’s Kim Jong Un regime. For that matter, sanctions have not even deprived Kim of Swiss equipment for his ski resort. Nor have sanctions deprived Pyongyang of the resources to credibly threaten yet more long-range missiles launches, and a fourth nuclear test. There is the further risk that even if sanctions are tightened worldwide to a degree that impels North Korea to come looking for relief, the U.S. and its allies may squander any advantage at the bargaining table. There is by now a sorry record of American diplomats trading away leverage in exchange for irradiated fool’s gold. That’s what President Bush did with North Korea in the 2007 nuclear deal, and that’s what President Obama has just done with Iran.

But if sanctions are to be Obama’s tool of choice for trying to cope with North Korean proliferation, then it behooves his administration to treat those sanctions seriously. As Obama observed more than a year ago, North Korea’s development of missile technology and nuclear weapons not only threatens South Korea and Japan, but “poses a threat to the United States.” The danger is not only nuclear blackmail, or a direct attack, but North Korea’s longtime habit of trafficking weapons and related technology to terrorists and terror-sponsoring states.

On the sanctions front, the U.S. approach has been to praise the tools while failing to forcefully or adeptly wield them. In response to North Korea’s cyber attack last year on Sony, Obama signed an executive order that opened the way to wholesale designations of North Korean officials and their affiliates, from Kim Jong Un on down. That has not happened. When administration officials brag up the U.S. sanctions imposed on North Korea’s merchant ships, for example, they neglect to mention that the grand total of vessels they have designated comes to a mere 19 — just a fraction of the fleet, and an even smaller fraction of the ships calling at North Korea.

Nor has Obama restored North Korea to the U.S. list of State Sponsors of Terrorism. There is a drumroll of excellent reasons to do so — including cyber attacks, assassinations, kidnapping, terror-related arms dealing and then some — as North Korea analyst Joshua Stanton enumerated in a report earlier this year aptly titled “Arsenal of Terror.” But State this year continued its ritual fiction that North Korea has not been involved in terrorism since blowing a South Korean airliner out of the sky in 1987.

As for the lassitude of scores of UN member states, with their inaction and low reporting levels on implementation of UN sanctions, the obvious conclusion is that on this front the U.S. is not even leading from behind. This is exactly the kind of problem that American diplomats are, in theory, paid to fix. It needs some sweat from Secretary of State Kerry, Ambassador Samantha Power, and State staffers around the globe. It also needs the full backing of the American president.

This past May, the Government Accountability Office released a report on North Korea sanctions, noting that “UN and U.S. officials agree that the lack of reports from all member states is an impediment to the UN’s implementation of its sanctions.” The GAO recommended that “the Secretary of State work with the Security Council to ensure that member states receive technical assistance to help prepare and submit reports on their implementation of UN sanctions on North Korea.” The GAO further noted, “The Department of State concurred with this recommendation.”

Great. Except in the five months since the GAO raised the issue of implementation, or the seven months since the UN Panel of Experts raised the same problem, there’s little sign that State has bestirred itself. For Pyongyang, that’s one more green light for everything from global rackets, to missile launches, to the next nuclear test.

Ms. Rosett is journalist-in-residence with the Foundation for Defense of Democracies, and heads its Investigative Reporting Project. Follow her on Twitter @CRosett