On Wednesday 14 March, MEP Nirj Deva (ECR, United Kingdom) announced that the European Parliament’s delegation for relations with the two Koreas, which he chairs, had held talks with North Korea over the past three years to try to persuade Pyongyang to halt its nuclear programme.
During a press conference in Strasbourg cited by French news agency AFP, Deva said that the European Parliament delegation had been "relentlessly advocating the case for dialogue without preconditions" to end the increasingly tense nuclear standoff with the North.
"We met in secret with senior North Koreans on 14 occasions. We understood their concerns and they understand ours", Deva said, adding that they included ministers and a new meeting would soon be held in Brussels. "We told them in no uncertain terms that if they carry on with the missile programme and the nuclear bomb programme they will only lead to an inevitable conclusion which is unthinkable", Deva said, referring to nuclear war. He added that the delegation had also met leading politicians from the US, China, Japan and South Korea.
Deva said the delegation had a role to play in developing confidence-building measures to support the planned US-North Korea dialogue. (Original version in French by Camille-Cerise Gessant)