Question to the Foreign, Commonwealth & Development Office:

To ask Her Majesty's Government what is their evaluation of the effectiveness of sanctions imposed on North Korea.

There is an international effort to maximise pressure on the DPRK to change direction from its current unacceptable course. Sanctions play a crucial role in this strategy. UN Security Council Resolution 2270 (March 2016) introduced broader economic sanctions on the DPRK that aim to restrict major sources of revenue used by the DPRK regime to fund its illegal weapons programmes. UNSCRs 2371 (August 2017) and 2375 (September 2017) expanded these sanctions to include sectoral restrictions on the DPRK’s trade in coal, iron, lead, textiles, crude and refined oil, and overseas workers. It has been less than three months since the UN Security Council agreed to the full coal ban, which marked the first sector-wide ban on exports from the DPRK. The first UN Panel of Experts report on implementation of those sanctions will be released in January, with member state implementation reports due on 3 November. Sanctions take time to have effect, but there are early indications of their impact. The Chinese Central Bank has instructed all Chinese banks to comply with UN resolutions, and Chinese businesses were recently given 120 days to divest themselves of joint ventures with DPRK companies. Other countries are also playing their part, for example by restricting visas for DPRK overseas workers or prohibiting all trade with the DPRK. The EU has introduced a raft of measures that go beyond the UN-mandated sanctions, such as an oil ban and reducing the ceiling on hard currency remittances to the DPRK by two-thirds.