Russia hands out work permits to North Koreans in defiance of UN ban
RUSSIA has been giving work permits to North Korean labourers, despite a United Nations ban on the practice, documents suggest.
Last September the UN forbade countries from authorising new employment contracts for North Koreans as part of a sanctions programme intended to starve Kim Jong-un’s regime of money following a string of nuclear and missile tests. But documents seen by The Daily Telegraph indicate that Russia has continued to approve work permits for North Koreans months after the UN ban.
A decree on foreign workers posted by the labour ministry on Dec 6 approved positions for hundreds of North Koreans, mostly manual labour jobs such as painters, bricklayers, carpenters or mechanics.
The list gave companies permission to hire 1,237 people from the country in the Amur region, near Russia’s border with North Korea.
Russia has approved more jobs for North Koreans this year, according to a report released on Thursday by the Washington-based think tank Centre for Advanced Defence Studies.
While Pyongyang is cut off from the international financial system, it is able to make an estimated $2 billion in hard currency a year by sending some 100,000 or more workers abroad. Up to 80 per cent of them go to China and Russia, where they are employed in what the UN has called “slave-like conditions” and send up to 90 per cent of their wages back to North Korea.
In 2018, documents show the Russian labour ministry has given at least 12 companies permission to hire 806 North Korean workers, the report said.
The director of Soyuz Stroi, a construction company known to employ North Koreans in the past, told The Telegraph he was still employing citizens of the country this year. “We are doing this, we’ve hired new ones and we have the old ones,” Malsar Khuseinov said. Of the UN ban, he said: “That’s a question for our government.”
Yesterday, a foreign ministry spokeswoman denied Russia was violating the UN resolution, saying it was giving work permits to North Koreans whose contracts were signed before Sept 11.