[imText1]The UN Security Council Committee concerning North Korea (the Sanctions Committee) inaugurated on Monday.
The Council appointed Peter Burian, Slovak Ambassador to the UN, to head the committee and Argentine and Qatari ambassadors as vice chairpersons.
The UN SC Resolution 1718 authorizes establishment of a sanctions committee to oversee the member states’ sincere participation.
The Committee, which will be composed of specialists from all 15 member states of the Security Council, will undertake the sanction tasks on North Korea.
To do so, the Sanctions Committee determines subjects of embargo, which are WMD related items, materials, equipment and luxury goods. In other words, the Committee virtually decides the level of pressure on North Korea by the international community.
The Sanctions Committee must report its activities of inspection and member states’ performances to the Security Council. And the member states are obliged to submit specific plans to fulfill the duty suggested by the Committee in 30 days.
Therefore, South Korean government is likely to present its own North Korean cargo inspection scheme and alteration in the inter-Korean economic cooperation program and get approval of appropriateness from the Sanctions Committee.
If the member states violate the resolution and the Committee’s decision, the Sanctions Committee can investigate and is empowered to take proper measures to correct the violation. Also, the Committee has power and authority to add items, equipment or technologies to be prevented from entering North Korea, if necessary.
Every year, the Sanctions Committee submits an annual report about its activities, and renews the ‘consolidated list’ of individuals and entities; those on the list will have their assets frozen and be prevented from entering or traveling through the member states of the UN. Thus, if the Kim Jong Il family is included in the consolidated list, the Kims would be banned from traveling and their private property hidden around the world would be frozen.
The Sanctions Committee depicted 359 individuals from the Taliban and Al-Qaida, including Osama bin Laden, and 124 entities on its sanction list. The Sanctions Committee compiled a list of 89 persons concerning Iraq, which was terminated to be active in 2003, including Saddam Hussein, and 206 organizations.
Currently active sanctions committees are 10, including that concerning the Sudan and Congo.
Considering previous and current sanction committees’ activities, the North Korean Sanction Committee would give a strong pressure to NK until the disarmament of nuclear weapons . In the case of Iraq, the sanctions committee had been active from 1990, since its creation, until Saddam Hussein’s arrest in 2003. The committee banned almost every export to Iraq, unless approved by itself; even goods with humanitarian purposes were required to receive permission of the Sanctions Committee.
Libyan Sanctions Committee, which was established in 1992 with the onset of the Pan Am explosion incident, stopped functioning in 2003 after Libya’s head of state, Kaddafi, apologized for the terrorism and compensated the victims. For a decade, the Committee had frozen all Libyan assets related to those responsible for the Pan Am incident, and had banned arms exports/imports, oil sales and air transportation.
