North Korean oil smugglers have been registering their ships in Pacific nations and sailing under the flags of those nations to evade sanctions, according to former U.N. experts.
The think tank said that it has been monitoring the vessels and observing patterns of “high-risk behavior” in their operations, which could be associated with North Korea’s illegal oil supply networks.
Neil Watts, a former member of the U.N. Security Council’s (UNSC) expert panel on North Korea, said smugglers used “layers of obfuscation” to prevent investigators from recognizing their illegal operation while sailing.
“Almost none of the Pacific Islands have escaped North Korean attempts to hide their vessels,” Mr. Watts told the news outlet.
According to the report, ship owners could select the flag under which their vessel sails by paying an unspecified amount of fee to join the country’s registries.
Hugh Griffiths, who formerly led the UNSC’s expert panel on North Korea from 2014 to 2019, told AFP that North Korean smugglers had been targeting Pacific registries.
“Put simply, North Korean smuggling networks know that these registries are not monitoring the vessels which sail under their flag,” he was cited as saying. “Smugglers in general have flag hopped. The Cook Islands used to be more popular, then it was Kiribati, then Palau, then Niue.”
The United Nations has imposed a series of sanctions against North Korea since 2006 over the country’s nuclear and ballistic missile tests. In 2017, the UNSC restricted North Korea’s import of refined petroleum products, setting a cap of 500,000 barrels per year.
Sanctions Evasion Linked to Nuclear Weapons Program
Joe Byrne, a research fellow at the Royal United Services Institute in London, stated that the smuggling of coal or oil could contribute to North Korea’s military goals and its nuclear weapons development program.“Whether it’s revenue generation from exports of coal, or keeping its missile launchers on the road with imported oil, North Korea’s sanctions evasion is directly linked to its nuclear weapons and ballistic missile program,” Mr. Byrne told AFP.
The U.S. State Department said last year that North Korea has deliberately evaded the sanctions “through elaborate black-market networks across the region and clandestine ship-to-ship transfers.”
Washington said it believes these shipments support the North Korean regime’s “unlawful weapons of mass destruction and ballistic missile programs,” threatening international peace and security.
“In 2021, 50 U.N. member states co-sponsored a message to the United Nations Security Council Sanctions Committee on North Korea calling attention to the fact that the DPRK [Democratic People’s Republic of Korea] had exceeded its refined petroleum cap,” the department stated on April 15, 2022.
North Korea has been ramping up tension with South Korea and the United States by testing various weapons, including its biggest intercontinental ballistic missile. Since the start of 2022, North Korea has fired more than 100 missiles.
Many of the missiles tested were nuclear-capable weapons that place both South Korea and Japan within striking distance and could potentially reach the United States.
