US imposes sanctions on Kim Jong-un over rights abuses
The United States has sanctioned North Korean leader Kim Jong-un for the first time over claims that he resorts to "notorious abuses of human rights.”
Pyongyang "continues to commit serious human rights abuses, including extrajudicial killings, enforced disappearances, arbitrary arrests and detention, forced labor, and torture," the US State Department said in statement Wednesday.
Acting Undersecretary for Terrorism and Financial Intelligence Adam J. Szubin also released a statement, outlining the so-called abuses by the isolated state’s leader.
"Under Kim Jon-un, North Korea continues to inflict intolerable cruelty and hardship on millions of its own people, including extrajudicial killings, forced labor, and torture," Szubin said.
According to a statement by the US Treasury Department, 10 other individuals and five government ministries and departments were also sanctioned.
The sanctions are said to affect properties and assets within the United States' jurisdiction.
A report by the State Department to the US Congress initially put the North Korean leader on top of a list of human rights abusers and those resorting to censorship.
The report added that there are between 80,000 and 120,000 prisoners in the nuclear-armed country, who are mostly the victims of the abuses.
The United States frequently accuses its enemies of violating human rights, while it is itself blamed for violations of human rights inside and outside the country.
Apart from that sanctioning the leader of a country indicates that "there probably isn't much of a hope for a diplomatic resolution," Zachary Goldman, a former policy advisor in the US Treasury's Office of Terrorism and Financial Intelligence told Reuters.
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