Obama Administration hints at sanctioning N. Korean human rights violators

A year after a U.N. Commission of Inquiry found the North Korean government responsible for crimes against humanity whose “gravity, scale and nature … reveal a State that does not have any parallel in the contemporary world,” action at the U.N. has effectively stalled in the face of Chinese and Russian veto threats. As I have written before, Congress can impose effective sanctions on those responsible in ways that the U.N. can’t and the Obama Administration won’t. But now, the administration is warning that it is “reviewing options” to hold North Korean officials accountable for their crimes against humanity:

“We’re reviewing options related to accountability for North Korean officials responsible for serious human rights violations, which the Commission of Inquiry concluded in many instances may amount to crimes against humanity,” a State Department spokesperson told VOA’s Korean Service, in reference to a United Nations panel report on North Korea’s human rights conditions released in February 2014.

The State Department official said Friday the U.S. will work with the international community to press for North Korea “to stop these serious violations, to close its prison camps, to urge greater freedoms for North Koreans and to seek ways to advance accountability for those most responsible.” [VOA]

According to the VOA report, the spokesman and Sung Kim, U.S. Special Representative for North Korea Policy have both suggested, separately, that the Obama Administration could use the new Executive Order 13,687 to do this. That order would allow the blocking of any property of persons who “have materially assisted, sponsored, or provided financial, material, or technological support  for, or goods or services to or in support of, the Government of North Korea or any person whose property and interests in property are blocked pursuant to this order.” This may be the most important provision in EO 13,687, because what really makes financial sanctions programs work is the in terrorem effect they have on third-country enablers, and their tendency to isolate the target financially.

The prerequisite to designating a third-country enabler, however, is to first block some agency, entity, subsidiary, or official of the North Korean government or its ruling party that the enabler materially assists. And here, the Obama Administration has shown a degree of restraint that borders on the farcical — it has yet to determine that Kim Jong Un is an official of the government of North Korea for purposes of this executive order. (As my Uncle Irving might have asked at such a moment, “Is the Pope Catholic?”) So far, the administration has used EO 13,687 to re-designate just three previously designated North Korean government agencies, and just ten mid-to-low-level arms dealers who were probably all replaced by other mid-to-low-level arms dealers months ago.

Not one North Korean entity or foreign enabler has yet been sanctioned specifically for human rights violations. In comparison, the administration maintains and enforces robust human rights-based sanctions against Iran, Burma, and Sudan, to name a few examples. If the administration wants to demonstrate some seriousness here, it might start by designating the German company that’s reportedly selling Pyongyang its advanced detection equipment to track down North Koreans who use illegal cell phones.

The likely stimulus for these latest statements is a strong denunciation of Kim Jong Un’s crimes by Rep. Ed Royce, Chairman of the House Foreign Affairs Committee and the leading proponent of sanctions legislation against North Korea (full disclosure: I assisted with the drafting of that legislation). Both the administration and the North Koreans seem worried about the legislation, for different reasons. Pyongyang knows that in the financial weapon, the “Americans have finally have found a way to hurt us.”* An administration that has stayed its hand for six years, and whose political influence on foreign policy is ebbing, may now be fearful that Congress will seize the initiative, and with it, the President’s relevance during his final years in office.

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* Grammatical error in original.