North Korean dictator Kim Jong Un has just been selected for membership in quite an exclusive club: The Office of Foreign Asset Control (OFAC) in the U.S. Treasury Department this week listed Kim and ten of his senior security officials as Specially Designated Nationals (SDN), a group that has included such "luminaries" as Liberia's currently imprisoned former leader Charles Taylor, Libya's late former leader Colonel Muammar Qadhafi, and Zimbabwe's current leader Robert Mugabe.
The North Korean state faces an array of increasingly stringent international and unilateral sanctions. Now for the first time those sanctions are being applied to Kim Jong Un personally. Treasury's SDN action freezes any assets held in the U.S and bans business dealings by U.S. citizens with the newly designated North Korean individuals.
OFAC's action was in conjunction with the State Department's release of its "Report on Serious Human Rights Abuses and Censorship in North Korea" in accordance with the North Korea Sanctions and Policy Enhancement Act of 2016. OFAC noted that the government of North Korea or the Workers' Party of Korea is responsible for
"significant restrictions on the exercise of fundamental freedoms and serious human rights abuses, including extrajudicial killings, enforced disappearances, arbitrary arrest and detention, forced labor, and torture"
among other inhumane and politically repressive practices.
The five agencies sanctioned are the Ministry of State Security, the Ministry of People's Security, the Ministry of People's Security Correctional Bureau and the Ministry of State Security Prisons Bureau. The ten individuals sanctioned in addition to Kim Jong Un are senior officials in those agencies.
This move follows the much more sweeping action taken in early June in which Treasury declared North Korea a "primary money laundering concern," thus requiring U.S. financial institutions to ensure that North Korean persons or entities are not using overseas banks to transact with U.S. financial institutions.
The designation of North Korea as, in essence, a criminal enterprise - let's not forget that cyber theft from the international banking system is perhaps Kim's most "successful" economic measure - has effectively blocked North Korea's access to the U.S financial system, and threatens the risk of secondary sanctions on foreign financial institutions that do business with North Korea. Both of these actions follow North Korea's escalation of its nuclear and ballistic weapons programs this year. Together, they significantly tighten U.S sanctions on North Korea which, until the U.N. Security Council passed its 2270 measures in early March, had been relatively lax compared with previous U.S. sanctions on Iran, Myanmar and even Cuba.
More than a Symbol
Yes, this week's blacklisting is largely symbolic. Yet it signals that Washington has elevated its concerns over North Korean human rights abuses to a higher level, one commensurate with its worries about the military threat posed by Pyongyang to regional and global security.
The Obama Administration's blacklist announcement comes days after the passing of Nobel Laureate Elie Wiesel in New York City, and serves as an apt honorific to one of the most distinguished voices for human rights. The United Nations Commission of Inquiry on North Korean human rights abuses, in a seminal report released in 2014, likened the North Korean gulag, where 80,000-120,000 North Koreans are imprisoned, to Nazi-era atrocities. Someone must be held responsible, and this week's action identifies those people by name, starting with the Supreme Leader.
Washington's forceful moves remind us of the anachronism that is North Korea, and also of its grave threat to human rights and global security. What further evidence do we need of the critical importance of supporting the U.S. alliance with the democratic, prosperous and free Republic of Korea?