Sanctions – Page 9

July 11, 2016

U.S. joins diplomatic squeeze on North Korean labor exports

Last week, the Leiden Asia Centre made headlines around the world with the release of its exhaustive, 115-page report, “Slaves to the System,” on North Korea’s overseas labor arrangements and how those laborers are treated. The Leiden report coincides with new diplomatic efforts by the U.S., South Korea, and now, the International Labor Organization to bring those arrangements to an end. The Chosun Ilbo reports that the U.S. government “is preparing a series of reports on the abuse of North Koreans...

Diplomacy/Human Trafficking/Sanctions

July 8, 2016

A blanket trade embargo won’t help us disarm or reform North Korea

In Wednesday’s post, I wrote about Beyond Parallel’s imagery analysis pointing to a decline in cross-border trade between China and North Korea, along with the limitations of that analysis and its great potential if expanded and focused. But I also alluded to a broader policy concern about the error of equating trade volume with sanctions enforcement: that while China’s under-enforcement of sanctions has historically been the greatest impediment to our North Korea policy, sanctions over-enforcement is an equal danger. Recently, I’ve heard...

Border Control/Capitalism/Famine & Food Aid/Sanctions

July 7, 2016

The designation of His Corpulency for human rights abuses is symbolic. Powerfully symbolic.

About a week later than my prediction in this post and a full decade after it should have done so, the Treasury Department has finally designated His Porcine Majesty, ten of his worst henchmen, and nine government agencies for human rights abuses. “Under Kim Jong Un, North Korea continues to inflict intolerable cruelty and hardship on millions of its own people, including extrajudicial killings, forced labor, and torture,” said Adam J. Szubin, Acting Under Secretary for Terrorism and Financial Intelligence....

Human Rights/Sanctions

July 6, 2016

The evidence of China’s compliance with North Korea sanctions is still mixed.

This week, there has been much talk and excitement about a new study, by the new blog Beyond Parallel, analyzing satellite imagery of six select sites along the Chinese-North Korean border, and finding evidence of a recent decline in bilateral trade. From this, the study concludes that China may be (as Josh Rogin paraphrases it for The Washington Post) “Beijing has been quietly punishing Kim by cutting off the flow of funds to his regime.” Here are the study’s two main...

China & Korea/Sanctions

July 1, 2016

Sanctions Diplomacy: Yesterday Uganda, today Namibia, tomorrow Cambodia

Earlier this week, when a senior Namibian official who had defended her government’s military cooperation with North Korea showed up in Pyongyang, I conceded that she could be there to terminate that cooperation, but didn’t assess that possibility as very likely. But yesterday, the Namibian government announced it was ending its joint projects with North Korea, including a North Korean-run arms factory, to comply with new U.N. sanctions: “The Government of the Republic of Namibia, in fulfilling her international obligations...

Africa/Sanctions/Southeast Asia

June 28, 2016

N. Korean counterfeiting surges as Bureau 39’s checks bounce.

When the Secret Service first found high-quality counterfeit dollars circulating in the Middle East over three decades ago, North Korea wasn’t the prime suspect; . The counterfeits were so good that experts could only tell them from the originals by the superior quality of their printing, so the Secret Service named them “supernotes.” The Secret Service’s suspicions shifted to North Korea in 2000, after Cambodian authorities arrested Yoshimi Tanaka, a Japanese Red Army hijacker who had taken refuge in North...

Counterfeiting/Money Laundering/Sanctions

June 27, 2016

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...

Human Rights/Sanctions

June 27, 2016

Top Namibian official visits Pyongyang

In March, this blog reported on the revelation by the U.N. Panel of Experts that the African nation of Namibia, a desert country in the southwest corner of the continent, had hired North Koreans, including representatives of U.N.-designated KOMID, to build an arms factory near Windhoek. At the time, Deputy Prime Minister Netumbo Nandi-Ndaitwah came to her government’s defense, admitting that her government was the site of a North Korean-run arms factory, but denying that the arrangement violated U.N....

Africa/Arms Trafficking/Sanctions

June 25, 2016

OFK on The John Batchelor Show

I’ve been a fan of the show for years, so it was an honor to be asked to come on to talk about North Korea on Wednesday night. By all means, listen to the entire program if you can, but my segment starts at the 11:40 mark:

Border Control/Sanctions

June 23, 2016

HRNK exposes N. Korea’s sale of crew services to Taiwanese ships, via Uruguay (Update: A violation of EO 13722?)

The HRNK insider blog carries a fascinating story that begins with “a recent speaking tour in South America.” Recently, a North Korean sailor arrived at the airport in Montevideo, Uruguay, from Beijing. The sailor and his minder must have been in quite a hurry to get to the port. They forgot his suitcase, which the airport authorities eventually declared unclaimed. The suitcase contained evidence that North Korea is renting crew services to third-country vessels via a Uruguayan broker. (HRNK claims...

Shipping sanctions

June 22, 2016

North Korean trading companies can’t pay their Chinese creditors because of sanctions.

Lately, the news about the implementation and impact of sanctions has come in so thick and fast that I’ve been unable to follow it all, and have instead bookmarked it until I can identify patterns and put it into context. A report I saw yesterday, however, demands immediate attention. According to the Daily NK, starting in April, the trading companies the North Korean regime sends to China to earn hard currency began defaulting on payments to their Chinese creditors because...

Sanctions

June 7, 2016

RFA: Poland to stop granting work visas to N. Korean laborers

Last month, I wrote about Vice’s must-see investigative documentary on North Korean workers in Poland and the exploitative and unsafe conditions in which they work for little or no pay. Via Yonhap, Radio Free Asia now quotes South Korean Foreign Ministry Spokesman Cho June-hyuck as saying that Poland will stop granting new work visas and renewing existing visas to workers from North Korea. “The issue of overseas North Korean workers has increasingly caused concern within the international community from the perspective...

Europe/Human Rights/Human Trafficking/Sanctions

June 6, 2016

Obama Administration, GOP Congress join forces in N. Korea sanctions push in Asia

It’s a rare day in any election year, much less this one, when anyone could write a post title like that about a major public policy issue. Now, for the first time since I began writing this blog, all of the cylinders — the President, the Congress, the U.N., South Korea, and Japan — are all firing in the same sequence to raise the pressure on Pyongyang and Beijing. Over the last week, we’ve seen the Republican Congress’s key foreign...

Anju Links/Money Laundering/Sanctions

June 2, 2016

The Treasury Department just went full Alderaan on North Korea (updated)

For decades, North Korean drug dealers, counterfeiters, proliferators, arms dealers, money launderers, and most recently, bank burglars have used our financial system to move their profits into the regime’s offshore bank accounts, or into casinos. For years, the U.S. Treasury Department had to fight Pyongyang’s abuse of the financial system with its hands cuffed behind its back by the State Department, which sought a deal with Pyongyang at almost any cost. But yesterday, in a move that was at least...

Money Laundering/Sanctions

May 27, 2016

Global wave of bank burglaries should revive calls to kick N. Korea out of SWIFT

In recent weeks, I’ve watched with keen interest, and some schadenfreude, as news reports have implicated Pakistani and North Korean hackers in a series of massive bank burglaries involving as many as 12 banks around the world, starting with the theft of $81 million (or $101 million, depending on which report you believe) from the Bangladesh Bank’s account in the U.S. Federal Reserve. These burglaries did not involve guns or ski masks. They were something more like armored car burglaries,...

Money Laundering/NK Crime/Sanctions

May 25, 2016

Seoul’s diplomacy targets North Korea’s arms trade in Africa

Just last week, I wrote that South Korea’s diplomatic efforts to secure compliance with U.N. Security Council Resolution 2270 were putting ours to shame. Seoul is now offering fresh evidence of this by doing what I’ve said for weeks that our own diplomats should be doing — going on tour in Africa to pressure defense ministries to stop buying from Pyongyang. Seoul’s direct approach to two countries with close military ties to Pyongyang highlights its push to stem North Korea’s...

Africa/Arms Trafficking

May 20, 2016

N. Korea sanctions update: I sense a great disturbance in the force, as if billions of dollars cried out in terror and were suddenly frozen.

[First, thank you for your patience with the light blogging recently. Most of my limited spare time has been consumed by a project that must take a higher priority than this site. That project has been perpetually at the verge of completion for weeks now, but should be done soon.] North Korea’s fourth nuclear test in January was a watershed in sanctions law and policy. Until then, the U.S. and the U.N. had mostly pretended to have tough sanctions against North...

"United" Nations/Money Laundering/Sanctions

April 28, 2016

Claudia Rosett: Shipping sanctions against North Korea are leaking

Unlike my friend, Claudia Rosett, I’d call the new U.N. sanctions against North Korea a qualified success, despite the fact that implementation is still a work in progress. This post, and the other posts it links, summarize the effects of just one aspect of the sanctions — their restrictions on North Korean shipping, which have idled dozens of North Korean ships. Since then, NK News’s Leo Byrne has reported that no North Korean ships have called in the port of Dandong...