May 26, 2016
By Stephen Gowans
The DPRK (North Korea) has asked the UN Secretary General to explain the legal grounds on which the Security Council issued a sanctions resolution branding the country’s recent satellite launch and nuclear test as a “threat to international peace and security.”
On May 23, the DPRK permanent representative to the UN, Pak Kil-yon, posed the following questions in a letter to UN Secretary General Ban Ki-Moon. The questions were formulated in light of the DPRK’s finding that nowhere “in related international laws, including the UN Charter, the UN General Assembly resolutions, the CTBT (Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty), the NPT (Nuclear Non-proliferation Treaty), (or) the Outer Space Treaty” are nuclear tests or satellite launches deemed a “threat to international peace and security.”
Pak asked:
o The UN Secretary General to clarify “the legal ground for determining the DPRK’s nuclear tests and satellite and ballistic rocket launches as a “threat to international peace and security.”
o Why “the UN Security Council … never made an issue of, nor enforced any, sanctions on the United States and other countries,” which have tested nuclear weapons and have “regular satellite and ballistic rocket launches,” if indeed these activities are truly considered threats to international peace and security.
The letter ends with a conclusion that it would be difficult for anyone of an unbiased mind not to draw, namely, that “the UN Security Council has gone beyond (its) powers,” and that those of its members who have themselves launched satellites and tested nuclear weapons have “committed an act of double standard.”
Indeed, the UN Security Council resolutions respecting North Korea’s nuclear tests and satellite launch can be, and ought to be, denounced as “nuclear orientalism” (the racist, colonialist idea that nuclear weapons are the most dangerous when in the hands of Third World leaders) and an attempt to enforce a “nuclear apartheid” (limiting the means of self-defense through nuclear deterrence to a small elite of nations, which can then use their privileged positions as holders of the world’s most formidable weapons to threaten the security, independence and sovereignty of non-nuclear states. This, the United States has done on innumerable occasions, and in doing so has created the structural logic that has compelled the DPRK to develop a nuclear deterrent.)
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