The United States has called for an emergency public meeting of the UN Security Council on North Korea, after its last ballistic missile fire, to be held on Wednesday at 7:00 p.m. GMT, we learned on Monday from diplomatic sources.
"North Korea continues to destabilize the region and threaten international peace and security with its missile launches
," a spokesman for the US diplomatic mission to the UN said in justification for holding the meeting.
The latter will be held as the United States fears that North Korea will resume its nuclear tests in the coming weeks.
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This will be the second public meeting of the Security Council since 2017, the first having taken place on March 25.
Between 2017 and 2022, the Council had only resorted to closed meetings due in part to China's opposition to open sessions.
Despite harsh international sanctions, North Korea has stepped up efforts in recent months to modernize its military, and has carried out 15 test launches since January.
His last experiment was the firing of a sea-to-ground ballistic missile on Saturday.
On Friday, Washington warned that Pyongyang
was “preparing the Punggye-ri test site and could be ready to conduct a test there as early as this month, which would be its seventh
nuclear test”.
Negotiations to convince North Korean leader Kim Jong Un to give up his nuclear weapons and halt his ballistic weapons program came to nothing.
The imposition in 2017 of several rounds of international economic sanctions by the UN against Pyongyang did not weaken the regime.
In April, the United States submitted to its 14 UN Security Council partners a draft resolution further increasing sanctions against Pyongyang.
The text, obtained by AFP, plans to cut from four million to two million barrels the amount of crude oil that North Korea would be allowed to import each year for civilian purposes, and would impose restrictions on new exports north -Koreans, including mineral fuels and clocks.
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Diplomats say China and Russia, which hold vetoes in the council and have long proposed a resolution easing sanctions on North Korea instead, have so far refused to discuss the contents of the draft .
It is
"now time"
to
"advance a resolution that will update and strengthen the sanctions regime"
against Pyongyang, said the same spokesperson for the American mission.
"We call on all members of the Council to approach the text negotiations constructively towards our common goal of denuclearization
," he added.
“It is not a bilateral issue”
or
“a regional problem”
.
“It's a problem for all of us.
North Korea's pursuit of weapons of mass destruction and its ballistic missile launch systems pose a threat to every member of the global community
,” the spokesperson said.
