SEOUL, South Korea (AFP) — South Korean President Park Geun-Hye on Thursday welcomed tough new UN sanctions on North Korea, saying they sent a powerful message to Pyongyang to discard its nuclear weapons ambitions.
“I sincerely hope that the North will now abandon its nuclear development programme and embark on a path of change,” said Park, who has taken an increasingly hardline stance with Pyongyang following its nuclear test in January and last month’s long-range rocket launch.
The new measures send “a strong message from the international community seeking peace on the Korean Peninsula and around the world,” Park added.
The sanctions laid out in the resolution adopted unanimously by the UN Security Council on Wednesday are the toughest to date on North Korea and, if implemented effectively, will apply significant economic pressure to the regime of leader Kim Jong-Un.
The resolution breaks new ground, sanctioning specific sectors key to the North Korean economy — such as mineral exports — and seeking to undermine the North’s use of and access to international transport systems.
The government in Seoul had been a strong supporter of the US-led effort to get the Security Council to impose a resolution with genuine bite, given Pyongyang’s defiance of four previous sets of UN sanctions.
“I highly appreciate the efforts of the international community, including the members of the Security Council, to reach this result for the dismantlement of North Korea’s nuclear programme,” Park said.
It remains to be seen just how far China, the North’s main diplomatic ally and trade partner, will go in effectively implementing all the new measures.
Wary of pushing Kim’s regime to the brink of collapse, Beijing has resisted harsher penalties in the past and has been half-hearted in its implementation of existing sanctions.
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