On Friday, South Korea, Japan and the United States called on all member states of the United Nations to deport North Korean workers for them, accusing them of circumventing international sanctions imposed on their country to finance Pyongyang’s illegal weapons program.
In 2017, the United Nations issued a resolution giving its member states until December 2019 to deport all North Koreans working for it, most of whom are in China and Russia, but also in Europe, the Middle East, and Africa.
On Friday, the South Korean, Japanese and US envoys to North Korea considered, during a tripartite meeting in Seoul, that the North Koreans working abroad continue to help their country to finance its missile and nuclear programs.
A follow-up to a previous missile test conducted by North Korea
The three envoys said in a joint statement that “North Koreans working in the field of information technology continue to use false identities and nationalities to evade UN Security Council sanctions and earn money abroad that finances the illegal programs of the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea (North Korea’s official name) to develop weapons of mass destruction and ballistic missiles.” “.
“We are also deeply concerned about the way the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea supports these programs through theft and money laundering, as well as information gathering via malicious cyber activities,” the statement added.
The envoys noted that Pyongyang “stole” as much as $1.7 billion in cryptocurrency last year alone.
In 2019, analysts said, Beijing and Moscow – two of Pyongyang’s main allies – continued to issue visas to North Korean workers to continue to benefit from this cheap labor.
And the envoys continued in their statement: “We call on all member states of the United Nations to fully comply with the decisions of the UN Security Council (…) by returning all North Korean workers who earn money” in these countries.
The statement “strongly condemned the DPRK’s repeated firing of ballistic missiles, as well as its escalatory and destabilizing rhetoric linked to the use of nuclear weapons.”
The statement also expressed “regret that the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea continues to ignore the difficulties faced by its people and chooses instead to devote its meager resources to its” armament programmes.
