The US on Wednesday sanctioned North Korean leader Kim Jong-un for the first time, citing “notorious abuses of human rights,” in a move diplomats say would infuriate the nuclear-armed country.
The sanctions, the first to target any North Koreans for rights abuses, affect property and other assets within US jurisdiction. They include 10 other individuals besides Kim and five government ministries and departments, the US Department of the Treasury said in a statement.
“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,” US Acting Undersecretary for Terrorism and Financial Intelligence Adam Szubin said in the statement.
Photo: EPA
However, inside North Korea, adulation for Kim, 32, is mandatory and he is considered infallible. A 2014 report by the UN, which referred to Kim by name in connection to human rights, triggered a strong reaction from Pyongyang, including a string of military provocations.
Earlier this year, the US Congress passed a new law requiring US President Barack Obama to deliver a report within 120 days to Congress on human rights in North Korea. The law designates sanctions for anyone found responsible for human rights violations. Kim topped the list.
The Treasury Department identified Kim’s date of birth as Jan. 8, 1984, a rare official confirmation of the young leader’s birthday.
Many of the abuses are in North Korea’s prison camps, which hold between 80,000 and 120,000 people, including children, the report said.
The five agencies designated were two ministries that run North Korea’s secret police and their correctional services, which operate the prison camps. Also named were the ruling Workers’ Party’s Organization and Guidance Department, a key bureau used by Kim to wield control of the party and the government.
The sanctions also named lower-level North Korean officials, such as Minister of People’s Security Choe Pu-il, as directly responsible for abuses.
Senior US administration officials said the new sanctions showed the administration’s greater focus on human rights in North Korea, an area long secondary to Washington’s efforts to halt Pyongyang’s nuclear and missile programs.
The report was “the most comprehensive” to date on individual North Korean officials’ roles in forced labor and repression.
They said the sanctions would be partly “symbolic,” but hoped that naming mid-level officials might make functionaries “think twice” before engaging in abuses.
“It lifts the anonymity,” a senior administration official said.
The North Korean mission to the UN did not respond to a request for comment.
South Korea, which cut off all political and commercial ties with its own sanctions against the North in February, welcomed the move, saying it would encourage greater international pressure on the North to improve its human rights record.
The Chinese Ministry of Foreign Affairs reiterated its policy of opposing unilateral sanctions.
UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon, who was visiting Beijing yesterday, said he was very concerned about rising tension on the Korean Peninsula and called on North Korea to refrain from making any provocations.
Using sanctions against a head of state is not unprecedented. In 2011, the US sanctioned Syrian President Bashar al-Assad and six other senior Syrian officials for their role in Syria’s violence. Former Libyan leader Muammar Qaddafi was also sanctioned.
Policymakers often worry that targeting a country’s leader will destroy any lingering chance of rapprochement, former diplomats say.
It is a sign “there probably isn’t much of a hope for a diplomatic resolution,” said Zachary Goldman, a former policy adviser in the Treasury Department’s Office of Terrorism and Financial Intelligence.
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