Search Results for: forfeiture

November 7, 2016

Treasury finalizes cutoff of N. Korean banks from U.S. financial system

After a long delay, the Treasury Department has issued its final rule prohibiting financial institutions operating in U.S. jurisdiction from providing direct or indirect correspondent account services to North Korean financial institutions. In English, that means North Korean banks are now denied a critical link for accessing the global financial system. North Korea is now one of only three countries to be declared a Primary Money Laundering Concern by the Treasury Department, and is the only country subject to Special Measure...

Categories Money Laundering/Sanctions
October 21, 2016

S. Korean human rights ambassador: Target N. Korean officials with sanctions

The U.N. has issued two more reports finding that North Korea’s abysmal human rights situation still hasn’t improved, and that Pyongyang refuses to even discuss it. Kim Jong-un continues to seal the borders, terrorize and purge potential dissenters, and cut off any subversive information. Camp 18 has reopened, Camps 12, 14 and 25 have expanded, and the fate of thousands of men, women, and children who were held in Camp 22 remains a mystery. How do you make the words “never...

Categories Human Rights/Sanctions

Understanding North Korea sanctions: Other Significant U.S. Statutes

Introduction Background U.N. Security Council sanctions resolutions U.S. sanctions laws U.S. sanctions Executive Orders U.S. sanctions regulations & general licenses Other significant U.S. statutes Title 12 – Trading With the Enemy Act (TWEA sanctions against North Korea were lifted in 2008) Title 18 – Criminal Code 18 U.S.C. 981 – civil forfeiture 18 U.S.C. 982 – criminal forfeiture 18 U.S.C. 1030 – computer fraud and abuse 18 U.S.C. 1956 – money laundering 18 U.S.C. 1957 – transactions in criminally derived property 18...

Understanding North Korea sanctions: Background

Introduction Background Here are the Treasury Department’s FAQs and overview of North Korea sanctions, as of 2016. U.S. and U.N. sanctions against North Korea are relatively strong on paper today, but implementation of the new authorities has been uneven, and has only just begun. Although there is much more that we can do to close sanctions loopholes, the most important priority now is to enforce the U.N. and U.S. sanctions that already exist, through a combination of law enforcement and diplomacy. North Korea...

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...

October 14, 2016

North Korea, secondary sanctions, tertiary impacts, and the coming death spiral

As I write today, rumors are swirling through the South Korean media of defections and purges involving so many North Korean diplomats, spies, minders, workers, and other officials that I haven’t had the time to either keep up with them or sort out the conflicts in those reports. I’ll try to do that by this time next week, and identify any patterns I see in them. In the meantime, an intriguing story by the Daily NK elucidates how well-targeted sanctions can drive disloyalties and fissures...

Categories Money Laundering/Sanctions
October 6, 2016

How the next President can confront the North Korean threat

Just over two years ago, I wrote about the conflict between Americans’ apparent impulse for a more passive foreign policy and their strong disapproval of what that policy looks like in practice. In other words, Americans’ views on foreign policy are seldom as simplistic as they seem to be. Strong majorities favored going into Iraq and Afghanistan, strong majorities wanted out of both by 2008, and by 2016, strong majorities disfavor the policies of those who would allow them to...

Categories Geopolitics
September 30, 2016

The Senate does North Korea oversight right; also, sell your Bank of China stock now

It took a few weeks for the Senate Foreign Relations Committee’s Asia Subcommittee to put a hearing together after North Korea’s fifth nuclear test, but when that hearing finally happened on Wednesday, I actually found myself feeling sorry for the State Department witnesses, Danny Russel, the Assistant Secretary Of State at the Bureau Of East Asian And Pacific Affairs, and Daniel Fried, the State Department’s Coordinator for Sanctions Policy. A few years ago, they might have gotten away with showing up unprepared,...

Categories Money Laundering/Sanctions/U.S. Law/U.S. Politics
September 27, 2016

The Chinese banks in the N. Korea money laundering scandal skated. They shouldn’t have.

Yesterday’s indictments of the Dandong Hongxiang defendants, who are charged with willfully violating North Korea sanctions by laundering money for sanctioned Korea Kwangsong Banking Corporation, might have been good enough for 2009. They broke the illusion that China’s well-connected bag-men and bag-women were immune from sanctions. To borrow John Park and Jim Walsh’s expression, they meant that we’d finally begun to go after North Korea, Inc. Unfortunately, this isn’t 2009. We’re now in a desperate race to disarm Kim Jong-un, one...

Categories Money Laundering/Sanctions
September 27, 2016

Treasury sanctions, DOJ indicts Chinese for violating N. Korea sanctions

As of yesterday, and for the first time ever, the U.S. Treasury Department has frozen the assets of Chinese entities for violating North Korea sanctions, and the Justice Department has indicted them for sanctions violations, conspiracy, and money laundering. The company in question is the Liaoning Hongxiang Group of companies, of which Dandong Hongxiang Industrial Development Company Limited, or DHID, is the largest component. The individuals are Hong Jinhua, Luo Chuanxu, Zhou Jianshu, and Ma Xiaohong, the CEO of the Liaoning...

Categories Money Laundering/Proliferation/Sanctions/Shipping sanctions
April 12, 2016

Angola may be defying U.N. sanctions against North Korea

A report last month by the U.N. Panel of Experts found that Namibia has been involved in joint projects with KOMID, a designated North Korean entity, to build an arms factory in the African nation. The finding drew a defiant response from the Namibian government, but as a defense to a sanctions violation, it was a blue answer to a red question. In response, I wrote this post — which attracted much attention in Windhoek — rebutting Namibia’s argument and explaining...

Categories Africa/Arms Trafficking
February 17, 2016

The end of the beginning: President Obama will sign North Korea sanctions into law

Update, 2/18: The President signed the bill. ~   ~   ~ This afternoon, the White House made it official — the President will sign the North Korea Sanctions and Policy Enhancement Act. The White House didn’t say when, but I’d expect it to happen within a week or so. The question now turns to implementing the bill to maximize its impact on the regime, while minimizing the impact on the North Korean people. For well over a month, the...

Categories Sanctions/U.S. Law
January 23, 2016

Arguments to Impotence, Part 2: A response to Joseph DeThomas

As Professor Lee and I have flogged, and flogged, and flogged, and flogged this horse that our sanctions against North Korea were far weaker than was widely assumed, we knew a few of you were rolling your eyes and wondering how long we would go on flogging it. The answer, of course, is, “As long as it takes.”  If the published opinions of Michael Green, Victor Cha, Bruce Klingner, Scott Snyder, the editors of The Washington Post, Evans Revere, Robert Gallucci, and...

Categories Anju Links
March 12, 2015

Russia’s nuclear cooperation with N. Korea violates at least three UNSC resolutions

My final excerpt from the draft U.N. Panel of Experts report is a lengthy graf (below the fold) describing long-standing and continuing Russian assistance to, and cooperation with, some of the same scientists involved in North Korea’s nuclear weapons program. It’s hard for me to understand how this is not a violation of the UNSC sanctions. Despite the fact that key scientists in designated North Korean agencies (for example, its General Bureau of Atomic Energy) were invited to do research in...

Categories Proliferation/Russia & Korea/Sanctions/WMD
December 18, 2014

If N. Korea hacked Sony and threatened us, here’s how we should respond

The New York Times, quoting “[s]enior administration officials,” is reporting that “American officials have concluded that North Korea ordered the attacks on Sony Pictures’s computers.” Senior administration officials, who would not speak on the record about the intelligence findings, said the White House was debating whether to publicly accuse North Korea of what amounts to a cyberterrorism attack. Sony capitulated after the hackers threatened additional attacks, perhaps on theaters themselves, if the movie, “The Interview,” was released. [N.Y. Times] The...

Categories Books & Films/Censorship/Terrorism (NK)/U.S. Law
October 16, 2014

Swiss sold N. Korea $180K in cigarette-making machinery as aid agencies begged for donations

The communist country’s imports of Swiss tobacco machinery components reached US$180,000 in the January-June period, far more than the $24,000 worth of imports recorded for all of 2013, according to the report by the Korea Trade-Investment Promotion Agency (KOTRA). [….] The country imported $65.28 million of tobacco in 2013, about 77.8 times what the country sold overseas, the report showed. [Yonhap] On the plus side, the trade statistics also show that during the first six months of this year, North Korea...

Categories Europe/Famine & Food Aid
September 26, 2014

U.N. should fund its aid programs from Kim Jong Un’s Swiss accounts.

The Wall Street Journal updates us on the dire financial state of the U.N. World Food Program’s operations in North Korea. The United Nations aid program for malnourished North Koreans may close after raising only a fraction of the money it needs to operate in the country, a senior U.N. official said in a call for donations. “We may need to scale down or think about closing altogether,” Dierk Stegen, the Pyongyang-based North Korea head for the U.N. World Food...

Categories Europe/Famine & Food Aid/Sanctions
November 15, 2013

Sanctions, Sanctions-Busting, and the Limits of Incrementalism (updated)

In the years since Treasury dropped the hammer on Banco Delta Asia, North Korea has adapted to make itself less vulnerable to sanctions. It has decentralized its currency flows to different banks to make it harder for Treasury to cut just one weak link. This means that achieving the same effect we achieved in 2005 will take more time today, although – and this is really just an educated guess – a determined attack on North Korea’s access to hard...

Categories Sanctions