USA imposes sanctions on Kim Jong-un over rights abuses

For the first time ever, Kim Jong-un just got sanction-slapped by the U.S.

“The government expects that it will lead the world to better understand the systemic and extensive human rights violations going on in the North, while contributing much to advancing discussion in the global community and beefing up related countermeasures”, it said.

“Under Kim Jon-un, North Korea continues to inflict intolerable cruelty and hardship on millions of its own people, including extrajudicial killings, forced labor, and torture”, Szubin said.

Another on the new sanctions list, Cho Yon Jun of the powerful Organization and Guidance Department, is in charge of enforcing loyalty to Kim, including executing those who defy his will, the senior USA official said. This is the first time that Kim has been directly targeted with sanctions.

It estimates as many as 120,000 people are trapped in a network of political prison camps in the country.

Apart from that sanctioning the leader of a country indicates that “there probably isn’t much of a hope for a diplomatic resolution”, Zachary Goldman, a former policy advisor in the US Treasury’s Office of Terrorism and Financial Intelligence told Reuters. OFAC says any property or other assets held within US jurisdiction by those named on the list are frozen.

A report by the State Department to the US Congress initially put the North Korean leader on top of a list of human rights abusers and those resorting to censorship. It was helped along in 2014 by the release of a United Nations Commission of Inquiry report that highlighted the problem, particularly the system of labor camps.

“The government highly praises and welcomes the step that the USA has taken in imposing sanctions on human rights violators in the North”, the foreign ministry said in a statement.

Still, there’s debate over how effective sanctions are.

The unusual but not unprecedented step of blacklisting a head of state is part of a concerted effort to step up pressure on Pyongyang that began in March when the U.N. Security Council and then the United States imposed harsh restrictions on trade with North Korea over its testing of nuclear weapons and ballistic missiles.