North Korea to Temporarily Lead U.N. Disarmament Conference

North Korea will assume the presidency of the United Nations (U.N.)’s Conference on Disarmament from May 30 to June 24 as part of a rotational system that assigns the leadership role to each of the conference’s member states for one month in alphabetical order, South Korea’s Yonhap News Agency reported Thursday.

“North Korea is among six countries — along with China, Colombia, Cuba, the Democratic Republic of the Congo and Ecuador — that will assume this year’s chairmanship for four weeks each in alphabetical order,” Yonhap reported on January 27. The official name of North Korea is the ‘Democratic People’s Republic of Korea.’

“This first session began Monday under China’s presidency, with North Korea’s turn set for May 30 to June 24,” according to the news agency.

The U.N. Conference on Disarmament is a body of the U.N.’s Office for Disarmament Affairs (UNODA), which “supports multilateral efforts aimed at achieving the ultimate goal of general and complete disarmament under strict and effective international control.” Among the U.N. Conference on Disarmament’s specific objectives to organize “effective international arrangements to assure non-nuclear-weapon States against the use or threat of use of nuclear weapons.”

Observers have questioned North Korea’s suitability to lead the U.N.’s disarmament conference given Pyongyang’s ongoing struggle to cooperate with a years-long international effort to curb its nuclear proliferation. According to South Korea’s military, North Korea fired two projectiles — believed to be two short-range ballistic missiles — toward the East Sea on January 27. The action marks Pyongyang’s sixth missile launch since the new year. The East Sea, also known as the Sea of Japan, is a marginal sea of the Pacific Ocean located between the Korean Peninsula and the Japanese archipelago. The strategic body of water likewise borders Russia’s Far East.

“In the latest launch, the North [North Korea] is presumed to have set a target on Al Island, an uninhabited island off the North’s east coast,” a South Korean military official told Yonhap anonymously on January 27.

On January 19, Pyongyang indicated it may lift a self-imposed moratorium on tests of its nuclear and intercontinental ballistic missiles (ICBMs) during a meeting of the country’s ruling Workers’ Party of Korea (WPK). The Communist politburo session instructed a relevant sector of North Korea’s government “to promptly examine the issue of restarting all temporally-suspended activities,” Yonhap relayed on January 20, citing an original report by North Korea’s state-run Korean Central News Agency (KCNA).

Yonhap interpreted Pyongyang’s reference to “temporally-suspended activities” to mean North Korea was considering restarting its nuclear and ICBM testing program, which the Korean People’s Army halted in 2018. The suspension did not apply to North Korea’s testing of short-range missiles, which it has continued to launch over the past four years, most recently on January 27.