WASHINGTON — The Obama administration announced Wednesday that it was imposing sanctions on North Korea’s leader, Kim Jong Un, personally, blacklisting the unpredictable ruler for human rights abuses for the first time as his reclusive government aggressively presses forward with
WASHINGTON — The Obama administration announced Wednesday that it was imposing sanctions on North Korea’s leader, Kim Jong Un, personally, blacklisting the unpredictable ruler for human rights abuses for the first time as his reclusive government aggressively presses forward with its nuclear and ballistic missile programs.
The State Department took the unusual step of naming Kim and 10 other senior officials it said were responsible for grave human rights abuses in a five-page report detailing repression in North Korea. The report singled out top figures in its intelligence and security ministries, which the department said had engaged in practices including extrajudicial killings, forced labor and torture.
The Treasury Department, imposing its first human rights sanctions on any North Korean official, designated them on a list of people whose assets are frozen and who are barred from transactions with any U.S. citizen.
The actions were mandated by Congress as part of a law enacted in February that required the administration to report on human rights abuses in North Korea and to impose sanctions on anyone found responsible. But senior administration officials said they had been long planned to take more aggressive actions that would move human rights violations — until now on the periphery of the United States’ efforts to isolate and punish North Korea for its bad behavior — to a more central element of the administration’s strategy. That involved a painstaking process of identifying the officials inside North Korea’s secretive system who were the worst offenders.
“The report represents the most comprehensive U.S. government effort to date to name those responsible for or associated with the worst aspects of the North Korean government’s repression, including serious human rights abuses and censorship in the DPRK, and we will continue to identify more individuals and entities in future reports,” John Kirby, the State Department spokesman, said in a statement accompanying the report. DPRK is an abbreviation for Democratic People’s Republic of Korea, another name for North Korea.
“With these efforts, we aim to send a signal to all government officials who might be responsible for human rights abuses, including prison camp managers and guards, interrogators and defector chasers, with the goal of changing their behavior,” Kirby said.
The new sanctions come as President Barack Obama has moved to intensify repercussions against North Korea for testing nuclear weapons and ballistic missiles. They also come about a month after the Obama administration sought to further choke off North Korea’s access to the world financial system by designating the country a “primary” money launderer. They also come a few weeks after Donald Trump, the Republican Party’s presumptive presidential nominee, said he would meet with Kim to discuss North Korea’s nuclear program.
Senior Obama administration officials said Wednesday that while the new human rights sanctions were proceeding on a separate track from those related to North Korea’s nuclear and missile programs, ultimately the two sets of actions should be mutually reinforcing.
Among the other officials named on Wednesday are Cho Il-u, a senior official in the Reconnaissance General Bureau, North Korea’s top intelligence agency, who the Treasury Department said was in charge of hunting down defectors and “conducting operations to harm” them. The State Department report said the bureau had been responsible for kidnapping South Korean and Japanese citizens and for assassinations over a period of decades.
Also blacklisted was Choe Chang Pong, chief of investigations at the Ministry of People’s Security, identified by the administration as being responsible for monitoring residents on North Korea’s border with China and arresting and interrogating defectors. The report said the ministry operated the majority of the country’s labor camps and routinely “uses torture and other forms of abuse to extract confessions, including techniques involving sexual violence, hanging individuals from the ceiling for extended periods of time, prolonged periods of exposure and severe beatings.”
“Under Kim Jong Un, North Korea continues to inflict intolerable cruelty and hardship on millions of its own people, including extrajudicial killings, forced labor, and torture,” Adam J. Szubin, Treasury’s top sanctions official, said in a statement detailing the new sanctions.
He said the actions “highlight the U.S. government’s condemnation of this regime’s abuses and our determination to see them stopped.”
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