The Mercury News

UK sanctions Russians, Saudis over human rights violations

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LONDON >> Britain on Monday announced economic sanctions against individual­s and organizati­ons from Russia, Saudi Arabia, Myanmar and North Korea under new U.K. powers to punish human rights offenders.

Foreign Secretary Dominic Raab said the sanctions targeted those behind “some of the notorious human rights violations in recent years.”

They include senior Saudi intelligen­ce officials accused of involvemen­t in the killing of journalist Jamal Khashoggi at the Saudi Consulate in Istanbul and Russian authoritie­s implicated in the death of Sergei Magnitsky, a lawyer who died in a Moscow prison after exposing a tax fraud scheme involving Russian officials.

Also on the list of 49 individual­s and organizati­ons is Min Aung Hlaing, commander-in-chief of the Myanmar armed forces, and Myanmar army commander Soe Win. They are accused of orchestrat­ing systematic violence against Myanmar’s Rohingya minority.

North Korean organizati­ons — the Ministry of State Security Bureau and the Ministry of People’s Security Correction­al Bureau — were sanctioned for running prison camps in the authoritar­ian Communist state.

Britain has previously imposed sanctions as part of the European Union or under the auspices of the United Nations. Since leaving the EU in January, it has implemente­d its own version of the United States’ Magnitsky Act, which allows authoritie­s to ban or seize assets of individual­s guilty of human rights abuses.

The U.K. law authorizes the British government to prevent sanctioned individual­s from entering the country, channeling money through British banks, or profiting from the U.K. economy.

“You cannot set foot in this country, and we will seize your blooddrenc­hed ill-gotten gains if you try,” Raab said as he announced the new sanctions.

Government and opposition lawmakers both welcomed the measures, though some questioned why no Chinese officials had been included, given Beijing’s new Hong Kong security law and repression in the western Xinjjang region. More than a million people in Xinjiang — from ethnic groups that include Uighurs, Kazakhs and Kyrgyz — have been held in a vast network of detention centers.

Conservati­ve lawmaker Tom Tugendhat, who heads the Commons’ Foreign Affairs Committee, said there had been a “remarkable silence on human rights violations in China.”

Raab said more people would be added to the sanctions list, but he wouldn’t “preempt what the next wave of designatio­ns will be.”

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