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The obscure branch of the United Nations that shipped sophisticated
computers and other high-tech equipment to North Korea violated the
U.N.’s own sanctions against that regime, according to a prominent
international legal scholar, who echoed congressional investigators in
calling for an “independent, external commission” to probe the incident.
John Yoo, a national security expert during the first Bush
administration and now a University of California, Berkeley, professor
who specializes in international and U.S. constitutional law, says that
the equipment shipped by the Geneva-based World Intellectual Property
Organization, or WIPO, “would allow North Korea to carry out simulations
necessary to design highly sophisticated nuclear warheads…without the
need for testing.” North Korea set off illegal nuclear blasts in 2006
and 2009, which led to the Security Council sanctions.
Yoo’s charge is at odds with the preliminary conclusion of the U.S.
State Department on the same issue. A State Department spokesman said
Wednesday that it “doesn’t appear” that WIPO’s actions -- which involved
sending the equipment and paying for it via China, to avoid heightened
U.N. oversight -- amounted to a violation.
Yoo’s opinion was echoed by other proliferation experts, including
former U.S. Ambassador to the U.N. John Bolton and a former top-level
expert at the State Department who now heads an important
anti-proliferation center in Britain.
Any conclusion that WIPO’s actions did not violate repeated U.N.
Security Council sanctions against the insular communist regime, Yoo
said, “would assume that the agencies of the United Nations have a
mandate to violate the very measures necessary to protect international
peace and security -- as determined by the Security Council, the only
arm of the United Nations empowered to take steps to prevent such
threats.”
For its part, the State Department declared that its own judgment was
a “preliminary assessment,” and that it would await a ruling by
relevant U.N. sanctions committees looking into the issue. Those
committees were not consulted by WIPO’s director general, Francis Gurry,
before the controversial equipment was shipped to the North Korean
capital, Pyongyang.
The very notion that even fully informed U.N. sanctions committees --
which were unsuccessful in halting the notorious Oil for Food scandal
involving former Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein -- will turn up much is
questionable, according to Bolton, who previously headed the Bush
administration’s successful effort, known as the Proliferation Security
Initiative. (Bolton is also a Fox News contributor).
“Unfortunately, these committees have been where sanctions go to
die,” Bolton told Fox News. “It is a complete abdication of
responsibility, not to mention a signal of embarrassing weakness, for
the United States to defer to the Security Council sanctions committees.
The U.S. government should first decide its own position on sanctions
violations, including the possibility of violations of U.S. sanctions,
and then present that view in the sanctions committees.”
In an Op-Ed piece in The Wall Street Journal, Bolton also warned
that, “By evading sanctions within the U.N. temple itself, these nuclear
proliferators show how to defeat even broadly supported sanctions
regimes through death by a thousand cuts.”
For his part, Yoo was emphatic that the WIPO shipments, which took
place in late 2011 or early 2012, and were revealed by Fox News last
April, were in violation of even stiffer U.S. sanctions that ban all
computer exports to North Korea due to its role as proliferators of
nuclear weapons technology and ballistic missile know-how.
The State Department, however, is also shying away from that
conclusion, as spokesman Victoria Nuland said yesterday. State, she
declared, is “seeking more information from WIPO so that we can conclude
our own work on whether there was any violation of U.S. law, but we
don’t yet have everything that we need in order to make that
assessment.”
Whether the U.S. will ever pry all the facts out of WIPO is
questionable. After earlier declaring that it viewed the issue with
“utmost seriousness,” and announcing that it would not make such
shipments in the future, Gurry blocked the appearance of two senior WIPO
staffers before the House Foreign Affairs Committee, leading to
cancellation of a briefing session on the shipments.
State Department spokesperson Nuland sidestepped a question at the
daily briefing yesterday as to whether the small U.N. agency was
providing “enough cooperation.”
Nuland’s reply: “Well, we are continuing to work with them and that
is a conversation that is ongoing.” She cited a number of “positive
steps” taken by the agency in the wake of the cash-for-computers
revelations -- but only on future projects, not those that have already
taken place. One of those steps is a “commission that will have an
external and independent auditing ability’’ to vet projects -- but only
in the future.
The under-the-radar shipments of Hewlett-Packard computers and
servers by WIPO shipments took place in late 2011 or early 2012, and
were financed through the Beijing offices of the United Nations
Development Program (UNDP). They were
revealed by Fox News last April. The U.S. was not informed of the shipments even though the goods were of U.S. manufacture.
Hewlett-Packard has declared that the shipments of laptops, printers and servers
violated the company’s strict ban on exports of its high-tech equipment to such rogue regimes.
When the State Department began investigating the North Korea
incident, it learned that WIPO and UNDP had also made a similar shipment
of 20 less-sophisticated computers to Iran.
According to Yoo, the equipment transfer gives the regime of
fledgling leader Kim Jong Un a significant boost in hardware and
software “that could quite conceivably contribute” to North Korea’s
nuclear-related programs
That alone, he argues, is enough to cross the threshold of the first
U.N. sanctions resolution against North Korea (known in UN-speak as
DPRK, for Democratic People’s Republic of Korea), enacted in 2006. That
resolution urges U.N. member states to prevent the “direct or indirect”
supply of goods and technology “which could contribute to DPRK’s
nuclear-related, ballistic missile-related or other weapons of mass
destruction-related programs.”
Yoo emphasizes the world “could,” which, he says, means that the U.N.
sanctions resolutions were intended to “cover a broad, non-exhaustive
list of items and circumstances.” He also noted that other Security
Council resolutions explicitly called on “relevant United Nations bodies
and other interested parties,” as well as nation-states, to cooperate
“fully” in the sanctions efforts.
Yoo offered his legal opinion jointly with another Berkeley law
professor, Laurent Mayali, at the behest of a WIPO whistle-blower who
first brought the issue to public attention by alerting the U.S. mission
in Geneva, among others, to the agency’s actions.
Click here to view the legal memorandum.
Their contentions were backed up by a sanctions expert who is not
involved in the whistle-blower imbroglio: Mark Fitzpatrick, head of the
Non-proliferation and Disarmament program at Britain’s prestigious
International Institute for Strategic Studies, or IISS, and a former
long-time top-level proliferation specialist at the U.S. State
Department in the Bush and Clinton administrations.
“Dr. Yoo's argument is correct,” Fitzpatrick emailed in response to
questions from Fox News based on the Berkeley professors’ arguments.
“Regardless of whether or not the computers in question could allow
North Korea to conduct simulations that would enable the development of
smaller weapons, it seems unquestionable to me that the computers could
aid the program.”
The fact that North Korea -- not to mention Iran -- is looking for
ways and means to boost its nuclear capability also seems
unquestionable. Immediately prior to the initial WIPO revelations, the
Kim regime shocked the world -- and embarrassed the Obama administration
-- by announcing that it was about to undertake a rocket-powered
satellite launch that Washington considered a cover for work on
missile-ready weapons programs.
The administration quickly canceled a freshly-minted deal to ship
some 264,000 tons of food aid to the poverty-stricken rogue country.
The satellite launch subsequently did not take place.
For its part, Iran earlier this month launched a variety of ballistic
missiles, including a longer-range version, as the U.S. and Europe
ratcheted up sanctions intended to stop the Islamic Republic’s
increasingly overt nuclear programs, which Iran claims are peaceful. So
far, the regime does not seem deterred.
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