The United Nations have voted to up the ante on the sanctions against North Korea after the US Government proposed a ban on textile exports from the country and a cap on their crude oil imports. But UN sanctions against North Korea have proven ineffective eight times before, so why would they suddenly start working now? Well, The Guardian spoke to Matthew Rycroft, the UN's ambassador for the UK, to find out.
UK ambassador Matthew Rycroft gives his opinion
Rycroft's first point in defence of the sanctions was that these ones in particular are "significantly tougher sanctions" than the ones that came before.
And the US wanted them to be even tougher originally! He added that measures against problematic nations such as the North usually "take time to have an impact."
According to Rycroft, these sanctions are different. He said that this is one of the first times that the UN Security Council have been using their new strategy of targeting parts of a country's economy with their measures against them. And now that there's a ban on textile exports, there is now a ban on every export in the North Korean market, which should start to send a message and warrant a positive response (well, or a negative one). Rycroft says that these new sanctions are "a very significant tightening up" of measures that were already pretty tough to begin with.
