Foreign Affairs committee  Let me start on that side of the picture. Between 2012 and 2014, together with the U.K. Foreign and Commonwealth Office, I've led the U.K. bilateral engagement on security issues with North Korea. The U.K. and, in addition, Germany and Sweden, as you mentioned, maintain diplomati

Foreign Affairs committee  Thank you. [Proceedings continue in camera]

Foreign Affairs committee  I think that the UN certainly needs additional resources. That's obviously something that would have to be agreed multilaterally and at the UN itself. I think if you would ask many of those who work on it, from their perspective they acknowledge very much that they are heavily un

Foreign Affairs committee  There are a couple of key areas, ones that I've alluded to already. The whole North Korean evasive ability rests on being able to conceal that they're North Korean overseas, to varying degrees. In some places they have to do that less than others. The North Korean label, in oth

Foreign Affairs committee  That's an issue that's really at a higher level and actually relates both to conversations that we have with governments that are still doing business with North Korea, as well as individual companies. I would say this applies primarily to UN resolutions before 2016. In 2016 we g

Foreign Affairs committee  I was just going to say that I think at the international level we've been better at drawing those lines more clearly but, indeed, we're carving out new pathways for sanctions. That will mean we may have some of those grey areas again going forward, simply because we're covering

Foreign Affairs committee  It depends entirely on what the problem is at a country-by-country level. As I mentioned, you have some countries that know about the sanctions regime and have no interest in complying with it. There are countries in the Middle East and Africa, for example, that are doing complet

Foreign Affairs committee  To some extent, I think North Korea is helping do the job for us. One of the issues underlying this discussion is the fact that, for a long time, China has assessed the North Korean threat in a different way than the U.S. and its allies have. When you talk to China about the natu

Foreign Affairs committee  Sure. It effectively changes the legal burden when making the case for a designation because, in theory, any designated entity or individual has the opportunity to challenge that designation in court. The description of the designation that you put forth into the public domain ha

Foreign Affairs committee  Well, first, I completely take your point on Russia. Sitting in the U.K., we see the threat development from Russia quite clearly, literally off the coast, sometimes, when it comes to Russian groups steaming through the English Channel. I didn't want to, for a minute, suggest tha

Foreign Affairs committee  The United Nations, in terms of its support system for the sanctions regime that we've created against North Korea, I will put it mildly by saying it's under-resourced. By the end of this week, it's going to look even more under-resourced because we're expanding the sanctions aga

Foreign Affairs committee  I think you've touched on an excellent question, which is engagement with whom? I'll be the first to say that I also support the inclusion at the international level of engagement with North Korea as part of the solution. To me, sanctions are about getting North Korea back to the

Foreign Affairs committee  That is a fantastic question. Yes, holes in the sieve is, I think, what I referred to. There are different gaps in different parts of the world and various levels of severity depending on where we're looking. Broadly, I would say the three largest regions we need to focus on, no

Foreign Affairs committee  Regarding your initial point about sanctions being a panacea, I would agree with your assessment, to the extent to which sanctions are becoming a tool that's deployed more frequently for a range of international security and threats, whether it's a human rights issue, or it's Rus

Foreign Affairs committee  It happens only rarely. It depends which level of sanctions you're talking about. At the UN level, traditionally what we've seen is that the majority of the sanctions list is composed of designations on North Koreans themselves. That may include North Koreans who operate abroad,