Inner City Press: Investigative Reporting from the United Nations

After UN's North Korea Resolution & Reaction, Quiet Committee Meeting

By Matthew Russell Lee

UNITED NATIONS, January 30 -- Eight days after the UN Security Council adopted a resolution about North Korea's missile launch, the 1718 or DPRK Sanctions Committee met in the UN's North Lawn building.

The new chairperson of the committee, Luxembourg's Sylvie Lucas, emerged past 5 pm from the meeting room. She accepted the Press' invitation to provide a brief summary, as her predecessor Ambassador Cabral of Portugal used to do.

She said the first part of the meeting was simply acclimating the five new members to the work of the Committee. The head of Panel of Experts, who recently met with Secretary General Ban Ki-moon, made a presentation. Then, she said, the discussion was about the resolution and implementation.

Inner City Press asked her if there had been any discussion of North Korea's statements after the resolution. No, she said. Hong Kong company? No. Missile launchers? No.

A gaggle representing, almost without exception, Japanese media hung on her every word, and thanked her afterward. This is an active or even omnipresent part of the press corps not treated well enough by the UN nor, it seems, its partners.

Earlier on Wednesday, the Security Council's president for January Masood Khan of Pakistan answered a DPRK question by saying that the members of the Council have been monitoring the statements from Pyongyang.

But apparently this monitoring is done country by country, or at least not in the sanctions committee. Anyway, it is a start. Watch this site.

From the US Mission to the UN's January 22 transcript:

Inner City Press: China had said it would only agree to a resolution that was, in its view, proportionate to this launch. Do you think that this response-they're claiming that it doesn't really-it's putting new names under existing sanctions but it's not really new sanctions. Is it a proportionate response?

Ambassador Rice: ...Clearly there are new sanctions in this resolution. By definition, any time additional entities or individuals or items are banned from action that they would otherwise not be banned from, that's a new sanction, by definition. So, we don't need to have a semantic debate and discussion here.

But this is also a resolution that built upon 1874 and 1718 and was a substantial tightening of the existing regime, which as you know is already a very robust sanctions regime. And we think the tightening of it and strict implementation of it, in and of itself, are very valuable steps. We worked quite closely and cooperatively, as I said, not only with China but other partners in the P5, and the Republic of Korea and Japan and other interested members of the Security Council to arrive at this outcome. We think it is a strong and credible outcome worthy of the collective effort we all invested in it. Thank you very much.

Summary from the January 22 stakeout of RoK PR Kim Sook:

Inner City Press: It seems the resolution was negotiated between the US and China. What was South Korea's role in those negotiations? Are you satisfied by the process?

Amb. Kim Sook: I appreciate the demonstration of solidarity in the security council in the process of negotiating the language of the resolution, and I especially appreciate the role that was played by the United States and China, but at the same time, this is the concerted effort of all the security council members. So, we did what we did, and every member had played a positive role, I would say. I'm not going to go into detail about that, but we did actually participate, and I think I contributed in a positive way.

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