US slams officials over rights abuses
WASHINGTON: The Trump administration imposed sanctions on Thursday on 10 North Korean officials and organisations over human rights abuses and censorship, including a diplomat in China accused of forcing North Korean asylum seekers home.
It’s the latest step in a US effort to increase diplomatic and economic pressure on Pyongyang, and seek “accountability” for officials of its authoritarian government.
The action was announced in conjunction with a new State Department report on dire human rights conditions in the isolated nation said to include extrajudicial killings, forced labour, torture, prolonged arbitrary detention and rape. The report, required by Congress, highlights abuses the US says underwrite the North’s nuclear weapons programme, including revenues it derives from overseas labourers. Thousands of North Koreans are sent abroad every year to work in “slave-like” conditions, it says.
Among the seven officials and three entities put on the Treasury Department’s Office of Foreign Assets Control blacklist Thursday were the commander of the Military Security Command, Jo Kyong-chol; minister of labour, Jong Yong-su; and director of the external construction bureau, Kim Kang-jin. The bureau is the government agency that manages the construction firms that send labourers overseas. Also sanctioned was Chol Hyun Construction, a North Korean company that exports workers, primarily to Gulf states and Africa.
“We aim to send a signal to all DPRK government officials, particularly prison camp managers and mid-level officials, that we can and we will expose human rights abuses,” said Scott Busby, a senior official in the department’s human rights bureau.