Seoul Tightens Sanctions Against Pyongyang

“The “sanctions resolution” that denied outright the sovereignty of the DPRK (North Korea) and its rights to existence and development will trigger off its tougher countermeasures for self-defense”, said KRT news reader.

“Today’s resolution includes the toughest and most comprehensive sanctions regime ever imposed by the Security Council”, UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon said in a speech on Wednesday. “Ltd. (DHID)” and four people supporting the illicit financial activity of North Korea’s Korea Kwangson Banking Corporation.

Professor George Lopez of the University of Notre Dame, a former member of the United Nations panel that monitors North Korean sanctions, told the WSJ these new sanctions are “tougher than North Korea expected” and could leave Pyongyang without the funds for aggressive nuclear weapons development.

In Tokyo, Japan said it was also renewing its sanctions against North Korea.

Entities blacklisted further included the Workers’ Party, the State Affairs Commission, which Kim Jong-un is chairman of, and North Korea’s flagship carrier Air Koryo.

This round tightens the sanctions imposed in March after North Korea’s fourth nuclear test.

An intelligence-sharing deal between South Korea and Japan allows the two countries to bypass the United States as they work together to combat the growing threat of North Korea’s nuclear and missile programs. Many ethnic Koreans in Japan have family ties to citizens under the Kim regime and, for many years, were an important source of remittances to their poorer relatives beyond the DMZ.

Such “donations”, however, turned into a business for North Korea after the fall of the Soviet Union and the subsequent decline of economic support from Russian Federation and China, in addition to the infamous “Arduous March” – a nationwide starvation from the mid to late 1990s in which hundreds of thousands perished. “South Korean and United States officials assessed the missile had a 10,000-kilometer range, which covers a large part of the U.S.”. Hwang and Choe Ryong-hae visited the South in October 2014 to attend the closing ceremony for the Asian Games in Incheon.

However, American President Harry S. Truman, who did not want to risk a total war with the Soviet Russians and the Communist Chinese of Mao, fired his military field commander in Korea (Gen. Douglas MacArthur) and the Korean War ended on July 27, 1953 with the Armistice.

The drill comes after Pyongyang responded furiously to more United Nations sanctions, which were introduced in response to the hermit state’s increasingly aggressive nuclear tests.

“Hayden is a bit behind the curve on the North Korea ICBM threat”, Klingner told Business Insider. “We suspect some quantities are coming in [to South Korea], but nothing has been confirmed”, Kim added.

One option being considered is to impose sanctions on Chinese steel companies that make use of cheap North Korean coal, the officials said.

“We have made a decision to carry out further sanctions in coordination with the United States and South Korea to comprehensively resolve the concerns of abductions (of foreign nationals) and nuclear and missile (development)”, Prime Minister Shinzo Abe told a meeting of Cabinet ministers Friday morning. Earlier this year, the US Justice Department unsealed criminal charges against the same company.

Yesterday, South Korea and Japan announced unilateral sanctions.