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Every athlete at the 2024 Paris Olympics has received a free Galaxy Z Flip 6, but North Korea’s Olympians may have to return their phones due to UN sanctions.
Samsung is one of the biggest sponsors at the ongoing 2024 Paris Olympics. It has allocated a special edition of its latest clamshell, the Galaxy Z Flip 6, for each of the 17,000 athletes participating in the event. However, the recipients may exclude the 16 participants from North Korea as these phones may violate sanctions imposed on the country.
Officials from South Korea recently raised concerns that smartphones, such as the Galaxy Z Flip 6 distributed among Olympians this year, go against sanctions levied on North Korea by the United Nations (UN). These sanctions unanimously voted through by members of the UN were adopted in December 2017 to prevent North Korea from gaining access to equipment to expand its arsenal of nuclear weapons.
South Korea’s Foreign Ministry issued an official statement citing Paragraph 7 of UNSC Resolution 2397, which prohibits “the direct and indirect supply, sale, and transfer of all industrial machinery to North Korea.” The ministry’s spokesperson said smartphones, among other items, are included in the list of prohibited items in the resolution.
The spokesperson further added that “necessary diplomatic efforts” were being taken by the South Korean government to ensure the phones do not arrive in the North, ABC News reported. Though the spokesperson did not reveal what these steps were, The Korea Herald learned officials in Seoul were in talks with their French counterparts “at both governmental and private levels.”
Objection from the South Korean authorities came after the International Olympic Committee (IOC) confirmed that phones intended for the North Koreans had already been handed over. However, none of the medal winners at the 2024 Paris Olympics were seen using or taking “victory selfies” with the phones – a gesture which every other winning athlete has adopted and is potentially part of a well-thought-out product placement campaign. This leaves the possibility that the phones were taken by the North Korean officials chaperoning athletes so they could be submitted to the government back home.
The IOC clarified it cannot ask athletes to return the phones. The IOC has traditionally taken a neutral stance on political issues, and imposed a ban on political protests starting 2020.
Notably, a similar controversy occurred at the 2018 Winter Olympics where South Korea, the hosts, agreed to hand over smartphones to North Korean athletes on the condition that they were returned, which was rejected by them altogether.
