While the United Nations is expected to give humanitarian aid to countries that are suffering, who knew that they were also in the business of helping rogue regimes obtain chemical weapons?
But that’s the unavoidable conclusion of a Fox News investigation, which found that a U.N. agency has been guiding North Korea through the patent process, bringing them ever closer to obtaining a banned chemical compound that is commonly used in weapons of mass destruction.
From the report:
For more than a year, a United Nations agency in Geneva has been helping North Korea prepare an international patent application for production of sodium cyanide — a chemical used to make the nerve gas Tabun — which has been on a list of materials banned from shipment to that country by the U.N. Security Council since 2006.
The World Intellectual Property Organization, or WIPO, has made no mention of the application to the Security Council committee monitoring North Korea sanctions, nor to the U.N. Panel of Experts that reports sanctions violations to the committee, even while concerns about North Korean weapons of mass destruction, and the willingness to use them, have been on a steep upward spiral.
Fox News spoke to several Security Council agencies about the ongoing patent process and they all denied knowing anything about WIPO’s collaboration with the North Koreans. And while they insisted that WIPO did not necessarily do anything to deliberately defy international sanctions, they did acknowledge that the agency should have known better than to help Kim Jong Un obtain such a controversial patent.
“This is a disturbing development that should be of great concern to the U.S. administration and to Congress, as well as the U.S. Representative to the U.N.,” William Newcomb, a former member of the U.N. Panel of Experts, told Fox News.
No, it’s a goddamn travesty, is what it is. And if the Trump administration needed another reason to yank U.S. funding from the United Nations, it’s difficult to see why this wouldn’t be the straw that broke the camel’s back. Whether WIPO was helping North Korea out of incompetence or direct defiance of global security norms, it proves conclusively that we cannot trust the U.N. to further American interests.
At the very least, it’s time for the U.S. to make it clear that WIPO needs to be under new management – like, yesterday. This isn’t the first time the agency has gone behind the Security Council’s back to work with North Korea, but we need to make damn sure it’s the last. This is unacceptable, especially when the U.S. and its allies – hell, even its adversaries – are doing everything possible to prevent Kim Jong Un from making progress towards a nuclear arsenal.
