The United Nations Security Council will unite today to condemn North Korea’s rocket launch and take steps to blacklist up to 11 North Korean companies and banks.

The outcome of a week of intense diplomacy represents a qualified victory for the Obama Administration after its first foreign crisis.

President Obama called for a “strong international response” to last week’s launch by North Korea. Washington failed to get the tough resolution it sought, but will achieve a unanimous condemnation and expand UN sanctions imposed after Pyongyang’s 2006 nuclear bomb test.

Susan Rice, the US Ambassador to the UN, said that the draft statement was “very strong and sends a clear message to the DPRK [Democratic People’s Republic of Korea] that their violation of international law will not be treated with impunity and indeed will have consequences”. China and Russia, which resisted any UN action initially, agreed at the weekend to back a Security Council statement condemning the launch and describing it as a “contravention” of UN rules.

The statement will demand that Pyongyang should “not conduct any further launch”. The Security Council will also agree to “adjust” earlier sanctions imposed by Resolution 1718 in 2006. The resolution, passed days after North Korea’s nuclear test, imposed sanctions on North Korean companies linked to the country’s weapons programme and banned the imports of components for weapons of mass destruction and luxury goods.

The UN sanctions committee quickly abandoned the effort, however, after North Korea agreed to dismantle its Yongbyon nuclear reactor. The sanctions committee has not met since the summer of 2007 and never blacklisted a single North Korean company.

In its statement today, the Security Council will call on the sanctions committee – made up of all 15 council members – to designate “entities and goods” by April 24. If the sanctions committee gets deadlocked because it works by consensus, the designation will be made by a vote in the full Security Council by April 30.

The United States wants to blacklist 11 North Korean companies and banks linked to its missile and nuclear programmes, diplomats say.

Zhang Yesui, China’s UN representative, called the draft statement “cautious and proportionate”. It denounced the launch, but did not say explicitly that it was a ballistic missile, as the United States alleges. North Korea says that the rocket launched a satellite.

The statement will urge the early resumption of six-party talks between North Korea and China, Japan, Russia, South Korea and the United States to achieve “verifiable denuclearisation” of the Korean peninsula.

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