Dandong: The border city on the Yalu River has long been the main hinge between North Korea and the outside economy, and it sits near the centre of a new account of North Korean overseas labour published on 16 September 2026. The report by the Multilateral Sanctions Monitoring Team estimates that Pyongyang still has between 35,600 and 101,280 workers abroad, nearly all of them in China and Russia, seven years after the United Nations deadline for sending them home.
The findings on North Korean overseas labour are stark. At least 17 countries are suspected of hosting North Korean labourers, generating between 450 and 800 million US dollars in 2025 for a state that confiscates 80 to 90 percent of their wages. Between 20,000 and 70,000 are thought to be in China, where around 10,000 new arrivals were recorded between January 2025 and January 2026. Russia hosts an estimated 15,000 to 30,000, some of them assembling military drones on Russian soil and some entering on student visas that disguise their real purpose. Pyongyang has dismissed the monitoring team as a ghost group, which is a familiar response and not a rebuttal.
For the European Union the report raises a question about diplomatic architecture as much as about sanctions. The monitoring team was created in October 2024 by eleven governments after Russia vetoed the mandate of the UN Panel of Experts in March 2024, ending independent reporting within the Security Council system. France, Germany, Italy and the Netherlands are participants, alongside Japan, South Korea, Australia, New Zealand, Canada, the United Kingdom and the United States. The Union itself is not. That means Europe’s collective foreign policy relies on evidence produced by a coalition that includes only some member states, while the legal instruments that could act on that evidence sit in Brussels.
The instruments Brussels could bring to bear on North Korean overseas labour are not trivial. Since 2017 EU law has barred member states from issuing new work authorisations to North Korean nationals, going beyond the UN baseline. The Council has continued to add names to its autonomous list, including in October 2025 a senior North Korean commander deployed to Russia. From December 2027 the EU Forced Labour Regulation will allow products made with forced labour to be withdrawn from the single market, a tool that could reach goods finished in third countries by workers whose wages are seized by the North Korean state. Supply chains running through seafood processing, textiles and construction in China and Russia are the obvious places to look.
The diplomatic logic points toward closer association between the EU and the monitoring effort. Brussels already cooperates with Seoul and Tokyo on security under partnership frameworks, and the North Korean presence in Russia’s war economy links the Korean Peninsula directly to European security. A formal EU role, or at least a structured channel between the monitoring team and the External Action Service, would allow findings on North Korean overseas labour to feed sanctions listings and customs risk profiles more quickly than the current informal flow.
There is also a multilateral argument. The participating governments have urged the Security Council to re-establish the Panel of Experts at its previous strength. Russia and China are unlikely to allow it. In that vacuum, the credibility of any evidence-based sanctions regime depends on how widely its findings are shared and acted upon. The EU is one of the few actors with both a market large enough to matter and a legal system able to enforce import bans. Whether it chooses to use that weight on this file in 2026 will say a good deal about how seriously it treats its own claims to be a security actor in Asia, and whether the trade flowing through places like Dandong ever faces European scrutiny.
