BREAKING: UN SECURITY COUNCIL UNNAIMOUSLY PASSES INCREASED SANCTIONS AGAINST NORTH KOREA
The UN Security Council held another emergency meeting today, after still more threats from North Korea in the wake of setting off a hydrogen bomb last week.
The UN agreed unanimously, 9-0, to step up sanctions on North Korea.
China and Russia both voted in favor of the sanctions.
Ambassador Nikki Haley, the top U.S. diplomat at the UN, led the push for an aggressive sanctions package over the last week.
“Today, we are attempting to take the future of the North Korean nuclear program out of the hands of its outlaw regime,” Haley said. “We are done trying to prod the regime to do the right thing. We are now acting to stop it from having the ability to do the wrong thing.”
While the measure was watered down somewhat to get the vote of China and Russia to avoid a veto, it was still an aggressive move over prior sanctions.
“[I]t is a very significant set of additional sanctions on imports into North Korea and on exports out of North Korea and other measures as well,” Matthew Rycroft, the United Kingdom’s ambassador to the UN, told reporters ahead of Monday evening’s vote.
The new sanctions resolution imposes a variety of new restrictions, most notably a ban on North Korea’s textile exports and a reduction of the regime’s ability to import oil. That’s short of the outright oil embargo the U.S. side originally sought; the embargo, along with a proposed freeze of dictator Kim Jong Un’s assets, was removed in order to evade the threat of a Russian or Chinese veto of the resolution.
It was the ninth sanctions resolution adopted by the Council since 2006 over North Korea’s ballistic missile and nuclear programs.
North Korea made threats that they would respond negatively if sanctions were passed.
They haven’t seemed to be moved by sanctions before, but cutting their oil and natural gas is new and will hit them where they live. As Haley notes it removes a significant amount of their revenue in ways that have never been tried before.
H/T Free Beacon
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