4th June 2023 – (Pyongyang) North Korea has rejected the recent UN Security Council meeting on its satellite launch, calling it “robbery demands” from the US, and has vowed to continue rejecting sanctions and taking “self-defensive” action. The US had called for the UNSC meeting last week to discuss North Korea’s attempt to put its first spy satellite in orbit, which ended in failure with the booster and payload plunging into the sea. Kim Yo Jong, sister of North Korean leader Kim Jong Un, stated that this meeting was another sign that the council served as a US “political appendage” by accepting Washington’s demands. She further added that the satellite launch was a “legitimate, self-defensive countermeasure” against increasing threats from the US and its allies. North Korea will never acknowledge UN sanctions resolutions, she said, pledging to continue exercising its sovereign rights, including launching spy satellites.
In another dispatch, the state media KCNA published a commentary by Kim Myong Chol, whom it described as an international affairs analyst, criticising a resolution adopted by the International Maritime Organization’s (IMO) security committee. North Korea had informed the IMO of a time frame of its planned satellite launch, and the resolution “strongly” condemned the isolated country’s missile tests “which seriously threatened the safety of seafarers and international shipping.” The analyst also accused the IMO of being “completely politicised” by following the US and its allies’ “anti-North Korea, hostile policy.”