Search Results for “censorship”

November 28, 2016

There’s no appeasing North Korea

North Korea has violated or summarily withdrawn from an armistice, the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty, two IAEA safeguards agreements, an inter-Korean denuclearization agreement, two agreed frameworks, a joint denuclearization statement, the Leap Day agreement, and six U.N. Security Council resolutions — and yet, the most stubborn “engagers” of Pyongyang look on this clear historical record and declare that it calls for yet another piece of paper. Now that calls to negotiate a peace treaty with Pyongyang are metastasizing from the pro-North...

Appeasement/Diplomacy

November 18, 2016

If the CIA isn’t funding this covert communications network for North Korea, it should be

Many years ago, when I was a young engineering student at my small college in South Dakota, a grizzled CIA operations officer came to my school to recruit technical experts. To an aspiring man of the world living in a small, isolated island in a vast ocean of grass and sagebrush, before the arrival of the internet, the idea of meeting a real CIA man stoked an irresistible curiosity in me. You might as well have laid a trail of...

Subversion

North Korea Sanctions & Policy Enhancement Act FAQ

What does the NKSPEA do? The North Korea Sanctions and Policy Enhancement Act, or NKSPEA, was signed into law by President Obama in February 2016, after North Korea’s fourth nuclear test. The NKSPEA uses targeted financial and economic sanctions to isolate Kim Jong Un and his top officials from the assets they maintain in foreign banks, and from the hard currency that sustains their rule. These assets are derived in part from illicit activities and proliferation, and are used to...

Understanding North Korea sanctions: U.S. Sanctions Executive Orders

Introduction Background U.N. Security Council sanctions resolutions U.S. sanctions laws U.S. sanctions Executive Orders: Executive orders are the single most important tool for the enforcement of sanctions. Generally — Sanctions executive orders are promulgated under the authority of the International Emergency Economic Powers Act, 50 U.S.C. 1705 et seq. Under the IEEPA, Congress gives the President the power to declare a national security emergency, and to block certain property as necessary to address that emergency. Violations of the IEEPA are punishable...

Understanding North Korea sanctions: U.S. Sanctions Laws

Introduction Background U.N. Security Council sanctions resolutions U.S. sanctions laws Korea bill tracker on Congress.gov, to help you keep up with Korea-related legislation. Iran, North Korea & Syria Nonproliferation Act, Pub. L. No. 106-178, Mar. 14, 2000 (codified at 50 U.S.C. 1701 note). Provides for very limited trade and other sanctions (such as debarment from U.S. government contracts) against persons designated for assisting North Korea’s WMD development. North Korea Sanctions & Policy Enhancement Act of 2016, Pub. L. No. 114-122,...

Understanding North Korea sanctions: An explainer, links & authorities

Introduction: Why I created this page Background Until February of 2016, U.N. sanctions against North Korea were strong on paper but poorly enforced, and U.S. sanctions against North Korea were (contrary to the assumptions of many journalists and academics) comparatively weak — weaker than our sanctions against Belarus and Zimbabwe. Sanctions against North Korea strengthened considerably in 2016 with the passage in February of the North Korea Sanctions and Policy Enhancement Act, and the U.N. Security Council’s approval of Resolution...

September 20, 2016

Pyongyang’s peace trap: What is N. Korea’s asking price, and who will pay it?

In 1994, one might have been forgiven for believing that for the right price, an isolated, famine-stricken, and potentially unstable regime in Pyongyang might have agreed to trade a nascent nuclear weapons program for the financial foundations of a new stability. Much harder to accept, given subsequent experience, is how the Bush administration could have reached the same conclusion in 2007, when North Korea’s nuclear program was no longer nascent, and when (thanks to the Sunshine Policy’s unconditional aid, and...

Appeasement/Diplomacy

September 8, 2016

Dear AFP: May we see your agreements with the North Korean government?

This blog often criticizes the way the media cover North Korea; in fact, it sometimes even criticizes the way the media cover the media who cover North Korea. In the case of Agence France-Presse’s newly opened bureau in Pyongyang, most other media are treating AFP’s low-key opening ceremony as a non-event. It probably is a non-event — except for what it may mean for the decline in journalistic ethics, the corruption of our media, and their transformation into global propaganda...

AFP Watch/AP Watch

September 1, 2016

What victory looks like from Pyongyang (Parts 1 and 2)

Part 1 David Straub’s “Anti-Americanism in Democratizing South Korea“ has resonated with me in several ways, but none of them more than Straub’s deep ambivalence about Korea in the late 1990s and early 2000s, a time when I also served there as a young Army officer. Straub admits that in writing his book, he struggled to reconcile, and to show his readers, an honest-yet-fair portrayal of a society that earned his affection, and also caused him much exasperation, even as...

An Alliance?/Anti-Americanism/Appeasement/Censorship/Democracy/Diplomacy/Korean Society/Korean War II

August 23, 2016

Amid surge in elite defections, China raises bounties on North Korean refugees

The State Department, which refuses to re-designate North Korea as a state sponsor of terrorism despite all of the recent and well-documented cases of Pyongyang sending its agents to kidnap and kill refugees, emigres, and activists — and amid reports that it is sending more hit-men now — is calling on governments around the world to protect North Korean refugees. That’s good, I suppose. “We urge all countries to cooperate in the protection of North Korean refugees and asylum seekers within...

Defectors/Refugees

July 27, 2016

What Pyongyang Must Do to Get Sanctions Lifted

If a problem cannot be solved, enlarge it. – Dwight D. Eisenhower In yesterday’s post, I confronted two unwelcome facts: first, that Kim Jong-un almost certainly will not give up his nuclear arsenal voluntarily; and second, that we cannot learn to live with a nuclear North Korea (or more accurately, it will not learn to live with us). To these, I’ll add a third: things in Korea will certainly get much scarier over the next few years. Pyongyang is blaming...

Sanctions/U.S. Law

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

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 14, 2016

North Koreans find leaks in Kim Jong-un’s information blockade

Until 2011, the erosion of North Korea’s border control and the infiltration of foreign ideas may have been the only hopeful trends in a country where just about all of the news is bad. When Kim Jong-un came to power, however, he launched an all–out effort to seal North Korea’s leaky border with China. Most of the evidence tells us that that effort has had considerable success. It cut the flow of refugees from North to South Korea in half, and (with...

Border Control/Subversion

June 13, 2016

Meet the “Libertarians” who would surrender our liberty & our security to Kim Jong-un’s censors

I doubt that America has fully come to terms with the damage done to its freedom of expression by the Sony cyberterrorist attack of 2014, or by the increasing willingness of Muslim supremacists to extinguish our civil liberties through violence. It is an easy thing to be a civil libertarian when the subject is, say, the limits of a proposed law allowing the FBI or NSA to eavesdrop on suspected terrorists’ communications or monitor their social media posts. Even if we...

Censorship/Cyberwar/Terrorism (NK)

June 9, 2016

A strike by North Korean workers in Kuwait portends a dark fate for them, and for Kim Jong-un.

I first learned that North Korea had exported laborers to Kuwait when I heard that those workers were providing thirsty locals with a valuable public service by brewing black-market moonshine for them. Then, in April, a report emerged that seemed almost too remarkable to be true — 100 North Korean workers in Kuwait had mutinied against their minders to protest the extra work and unpaid wages coincident to the “70-day battle” leading up to North Korea’s party congress in May. (In...

Human Trafficking/Resistance

June 2, 2016

Congress asked for a real report on North Korean terrorism. The State Department hit CTRL-V and called it good.

As regular readers of this site have heard a few times by now, President Bush removed North Korea from the list of state sponsors of terrorism on October 11, 2008, and despite overwhelming evidence, the Obama Administration’s official view is that North Korea is “not known to have sponsored any terrorist acts since the bombing of a Korean Airlines flight in 1987.” A few years ago, a less inquisitive Congress might actually have bought that, but in recent years, as North Korea’s sponsorship...

Terrorism (NK)

April 1, 2016

European Union publishes new N. Korea sanctions regulation to implement UNSCR 2270

I’ve previously written about the importance of Europe’s role in enforcing U.N. sanctions against North Korea. On March 5th, the EU designated 16 people and 12 entities under its existing North Korea sanctions program. Yesterday, it finally announced the publication of a new “restrictive measures” regulation to implement UNSCR 2270. Based on the summary, the new regulation follows last month’s Security Council resolution right down the line. The measures extend, inter alia, export and import prohibitions to any item (except food or medicine)...

"United" Nations/Europe/Sanctions

Search Results for: censorship