United States imposes sanctions on North Korea’s Kim Jong Un

North Korea said Thursday that USA sanctions on leader Kim Jong Un and other top officials for human rights abuses are tantamount to declaring war.

Kim, along with 10 more top officials, has been accused of responsibility for abuses including torture in prison camps, propaganda and extrajudicial killings, the US Treasury Department said in a statement.

In an initial response to the sanctions Pyongyang urged Washington to withdraw them immediately and threatened to instantly cut off all diplomatic channels if they failed to do so.

In an unprecedented statement from the U.S. Treasury Department, Kim Jong Un was named a human-rights offender – the same day Pyongyang’s state media reported Kim visited the terrapin farm where he allegedly ordered the manager executed in 2015.

“As a result of today’s actions, any property or interest in property of those designated by (Office of Foreign Assets Control) within USA jurisdiction is frozen”.

Senior U.S administration officials said the report was “the most comprehensive” to date of individual North Korean officials’ roles in forced labor and repression.

It comes as America released a report, which uncovers North Korea’s political prison camp system and security apparatus.

The move by the United States constituted “the worst hostility” against the North, Pyongyang’s foreign ministry said in a statement, carried by the official Korean Central News Agency.

Mr Kirby said: “Whether it’ll have a dramatic impact on Kim Jong-Un and his decisions, I can’t say”. The State Department report said the bureau had been responsible for kidnapping South Korean and Japanese citizens and for assassinations over a period of decades.

Kim is “rather plainly ultimately responsible for the actions of his regime including its repressive policies”, a senior USA official said, speaking anonymously.

It was the first time that North Korean officials have been blacklisted by the U.S. over rights violations, such as running the nation’s notorious gulag. Why wait until now to sanction Kim under what appears to be a noncontroversial sanctions designation as a human rights abuser?

“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 worldwide community and beefing up related countermeasures”, it said.

The blacklist, months if not years in the making, drew on the work of national governments, worldwide organizations, civil society groups and defectors from North Korea.

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.