U.S. to sanction N. Korean officials, possibly to include His Porcine Majesty, for human rights abuses

The Treasury Department has sanctioned the presidents of Belarus and Zimbabwe and their cabinets for undermining democratic processes or institutions and has frozen their assets in the international financial system. It has sanctioned top officials of the Russian government for Russia’s aggression against its neighbor, the Ukraine.

It has sanctioned the president of Syria for human rights violations, censorship, and corruption, among other reasons. It sanctioned Iranian officials for censorship and human rights abuses. It has even sanctioned officials in tiny Burundi for human rights abuses.

[Camp 16, where prisoners are forced to dig their own graves and killed with hammers.]

As of the time of this post, there are still no human rights sanctions against a single North Korean official. As bad as things may be in any of the aforementioned places, are they worse anywhere than in North Korea?

The Chairman of the U.N. Commission of Inquiry that investigated human rights abuses in North Korea has said that “the gravity, scale and nature of these violations reveal a State that does not have any parallel in the contemporary world” and described the abuses there as “strikingly similar” to those perpetrated by the Nazis during World War II.

[The crematorium at Camp 25]

The Commission’s detailed 372-page report found the North Korean government responsible for “crimes against humanity, arising from ‘policies established at the highest level of State,’” including “extermination, murder, enslavement, torture, imprisonment, rape, forced abortions and other sexual violence, persecution on political, religious, racial and gender grounds, the forcible transfer of populations, the enforced disappearance of persons and the inhumane act of knowingly causing prolonged starvation.”

The lesson for every despot on earth is that nuclear weapons will immunize you from the consequences of your crimes against humanity.

Seeking to rectify this outrage, this year, Congress passed a law that gave the President 120 days to submit a report on human rights abuses in North Korea, along with a list of those responsible. The provision requires the President to make specific findings with respect to Kim Jong-un’s individual responsibility. Those found responsible must then be designated under section 104(a) of the law, which freezes their assets and threatens secondary sanctions against those who transact with them. The 120 days ran out on June 11th.

Even before the law passed, the administration could see the overwhelming bipartisan support for human rights sanctions and began hinting at imposing them. It still didn’t act, but after the law passed, it began dropping increasingly strong hints that it would finally impose human rights sanctions on top North Korean officials. North Korea’s latest missile launch now gives the White House new impetus to increase pressure on Pyongyang, as if that impetus was lacking after the U.N. Commission released its report.

According to rumors circulating in the press and in human rights circles, the President will finally sanction “about ten” top officials of the North Korean government today. [Update: Now we know that Monday wasn’t the day. Watch this space.] The rumor I heard last week is that His Porcine Majesty Kim Jong-un, the morbidly obese despot who rules over millions of malnourished and stunted children, will be among them.

That could be the first step in blocking the billions of dollars he maintains in slush funds in China, Switzerland, and elsewhere. It will be the first concrete action our government — or any other government — will have taken in the more than two years since the Commission of Inquiry led by Justice Kirby released its report.

The Obama administration will now speak with gravity and sagacity about the horrors in North Korea and its seriousness about addressing them. It will make a virtue of necessity and claim the mantle of moral leadership in holding North Korea’s rulers accountable for their crimes against humanity. I’d be content to let them carry it for their remaining months in office … if they really do lead. But this is not a moment for relief that our government may finally act, at least a decade after it should have. It is a moment to mourn for the victims, both living and dead, and for the forfeited moral leadership of a nation that acted so late, and only after Congress forced the President to act.