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The United Nations and North Korea

by Dr. Stefan Friedrich, Victoria-Charlotte Browning

A Balancing Act between Sanctions and Humanitarian Assistance

A leadership that defies all pleas for reason stands opposite a population that faces dire humanitarian needs. While the Security Council is desperately attempting to uphold the Non-Proliferation Treaty and trying to circumvent a nuclear arms race in the Asia Pacific by imposing drastic sanctions, six residential UN agencies and several more non-residential UN bodies are providing humanitarian assistance to the impoverished country.

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A man smoothes United Nations flags at the General Assembly 2017 | © United Nations Photo #732645 / Flickr / CC BY-NC-ND 2.0 © United Nations Photo #732645 / Flickr / CC BY-NC-ND 2.0
A man smoothes United Nations flags at the General Assembly 2017 | © United Nations Photo #732645 / Flickr / CC BY-NC-ND 2.0

With increasingly provocative and hostile statements from Pyongyang as well as a concerning number of ballistic missile tests in 2017 alone, stances in the UN Security Council (UNSC) toward the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea (DPRK) are hardening. In an unprecedented manner, the Security Council voted unanimously to pass resolution 2375 on September 11th 2017, which included some of the most drastic economic sanctions yet and entered into force only four weeks after the last sanctions-implementing resolution was adopted. While power struggles between the Kim Regime and the UNSC are played out in the world’s limelight, aid workers in the DPRK have been fighting a battle against deteriorating living conditions for decades; an often overlooked reality. Additionally North Korea is currently facing its worst drought since 2001, leaving entire crops destroyed and putting the country at immediate risk of widespread malnutrition.

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Andrea Ellen Ostheimer

Andrea Ostheimer

Director KAS Genf Office

andrea.ostheimer@kas.de +41 79 318 9841

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Konrad-Adenauer-Stiftung e.V.

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New York USA