The United States is looking to blacklist another ten ships for carrying banned cargo from North Korea, Reuters said citing US proposal documents.
Namely, the country proposed that the United Nations Security Council blacklists the ships for carrying illegal ship-to-ship transfers of refined petroleum products to North Korean vessels or illegally transporting North Korean coal to other countries for exports.
Additionally, Reuters informed that the proposal would be approved if none of the fifteen members of the UN Security Council Sanctions Committee on North Korea oppose the measures by the afternoon hours of December 21.
The move comes only a month after the US imposed sanctions on 20 vessels as part of its measures to disrupt North Korea’s “ illicit funding of its unlawful nuclear and ballistic missile programs,” the US Department of the Treasury’s Office of Foreign Assets Control (OFAC) earlier said.
At the time, OFAC designated six North Korean shipping and trading companies and blocked 20 of their vessels, all of which are DPRK-flagged. These sanctions followed a global port ban imposed by the United Nations Security Council on four ships in October due to their violation of sanctions against North Korea.
In September 2017, the US President Donald Trump issued an executive order on imposing additional sanctions against North Korea due to the country’s nuclear missile tests.
Further sanctions target the country’s shipping industry, trade, ports, and manufacturing, as part of an economic pressure aimed at cutting off sources of revenue that would support development of North Korea’s nuclear program.
World Maritime News Staff