US lawmakers introduced legislation on Thursday to broaden sanctions against North Korea by imposing stiffer punishments on foreign companies doing business with Pyongyang, a measure that could impact mostly Chinese firms.
“In the wake of the state-sponsored cyberattack on Sony Pictures, the bipartisan legislation targets North Korea’s access to the hard currency and other goods that help keep the regime in power,” said the bill’s co-sponsor, US Republican Representative Ed Royce.
“Additionally, it presses the administration to use all available tools to impose sanctions against North Korea and on countries and companies that assist North Korea in bolstering its nuclear weapons program,” Royce, the US House Foreign Affairs Committee chairman, said in a statement.
Photo: AFP PHOTO/KCNA VIA KNS
The vast majority of North Korea’s business dealings are with neighboring China, which bought 90 percent of the isolated country’s exports in 2013, according to data compiled by South Korea’s International Trade Association.
The bill responds to concern in US Congress about last year’s cyberattack on Sony Pictures, which was blamed on Pyongyang, as well as what lawmakers see as an international failure to rein in the reclusive state’s nuclear weapons program.
The measure is co-sponsored by Republicans and US Democrats, including the leaders of the House Foreign Affairs Committee, Royce and Democrat Eliot Engel.
A similar bill is likely in the US Senate. It is expected to enjoy strong bipartisan support in both chambers.
The bill would authorize US officials to freeze assets held in the US of those found to have direct ties to illicit North Korean activities like its nuclear program, as well as those that do business with North Korea, providing its government with hard currency.
It would also target banks that facilitate North Korean proliferation, smuggling, money laundering and human rights abuses, and target people who helped in the cyberattacks against the US, Royce said.
North Korea is already heavily sanctioned by the US and UN for its arms programs and nuclear tests. US President Barack Obama imposed new sanctions last year aimed at cutting the country’s remaining links to the international financial system.
“Contrary to a common misconception, current US sanctions against North Korea are weaker than our sanctions against Belarus and Zimbabwe,” said Joshua Stanton, a Washington attorney and blogger who assisted with the drafting of the legislation.
“Other than some pinprick, whack-a-mole sanctions against low and mid-level arms dealers and just one major North Korean bank, their strength is mostly a figment of the academic imagination,” Stanton said.
Critics view the flow of hard currency into North Korea as potentially funding North Korea’s nuclear weapons program, but it was not clear to what extent companies engaged in legal businesses, such as tourism, would be affected by the proposed measures.
Such connections are difficult to track in China, and separating legal business from illicit can be even harder.
Bank of China, China’s fourth-biggest bank, said in May 2013 that it had shut the account of North Korea’s main foreign exchange bank, Foreign Trade Bank of the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea, in the wake of international pressure to punish Pyongyang over its nuclear and missile programs.
The bill is intended to push the Obama administration, which contends the president already has sufficient authority to punish Pyongyang.
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