SINGAPORE (Reuters) – South Korea’s defence minister said on Saturday that some countries were “ignoring North Korea’s unlawful behaviour”, which he said threatens to weaken U.N. sanctions against its missile and nuclear programmes.
China and Russia on Friday ignored a U.S. call for the U.N. Security Council to condemn North Korea for a recent attempt to launch a satellite and instead blamed the United States for increasing tension on the Korean peninsula.
“This creates holes in sanctions against North Korea passed at the U.N. Security Council,” Defence Minister Lee Jong-sup said in a speech at the Shangri-La Dialogue in Singapore, Asia’s top security summit.
“Choosing inactivity to North Korea’s unlawful behaviour will worsen the security of not only the Korean peninsula, in the Pacific region but also the entire world,” Lee said.
The South Korean minister reaffirmed the importance of trilateral security coordination with the United States and Japan to deter North Korea.
The United States and its two major allies will share North Korean missile warning data in real time “within this year”, Lee told reporters after a meeting with his U.S. and Japanese counterparts, according to Yonhap News Agency.
With North Korea launching ballistic missiles at an unprecedented pace in the past year, the three countries in November agreed to speed up information-sharing, including a pact to share real-time missile tracking data.
(Reporting by Kanupriya Kapoor, Ju-min Park; Editing by Raju Gopalakrishnan, Robert Birsel)
