U.S. Representative Chris Smith (NJ-04), a senior member of the House Foreign Affairs Committee and chairman of its global human rights subcommittee, issued a strong statement on Jan. 11 calling for House passage of the North Korea Sanctions Enforcement Act. The House passed the measure 418-2 on Jan. 2. The following are Smith's floor remarks:
I rise in strong support of H.R. 757, the North Korea Sanctions Enforcement Act of 2016. There is a compelling need to pass tough and effective legislation to freeze the assets of the Kim Jong-un regime.
I commend Mr. Royce, for his long work on North Korea issues, and his dogged determination to bring this bill to the floor. I again thank Ranking Member Eliot Engel for his good, strong sense of bipartisanship. This is a one-two punch against a cruel dictatorship, and this legislation has to get to the President as soon as possible.
Mr. Speaker, whether it be in North Korea or Iran—when will we learn the hard lesson that totalitarian states do not negotiate in good faith, cannot be trusted to hold up their end of the bargain, and use our goodwill and our foreign capital and keep on proliferating. They will not allow intrusive inspections because it weakens their status at home. They use nuclear weapons negotiations to enhance their own diplomatic status and to eventually gain an end to punitive sanctions.
In the end, nuclear negotiations earn rouge regime like Iran and North Korea foreign capital or other investments from the West or other states like China and Russia. They use that to fund additional missile technology, fund criminal or terrorist activities, and to continue with clandestine nuclear programs.
During the Bush Administration the most effective tools in bringing North Korea to heel was the freezing of its assets in the Banco Delta Asia in Macau and the building of an international coalition to interdict suspect North Korea shipping.
These should be our priorities now—in the shadow of North Korea’s nuclear tests—by imposing mandatory sanctions on the perpetrators of human rights abuses, censorship, arms and human trafficking, money laundering, and proliferation.
Nearly two years ago, a U.N. Commission of Inquiry reported that ongoing crimes against humanity in North Korea have no “parallel in the contemporary world.” These crimes include “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.”
Kim Jong-un cares not at all about the welfare of his own people. We should expect him to care even less about the welfare Japanese, South Korean, or even U.S. citizens—who face the threat of North Korean nuclear weapons.
The U.N. Commission recommended that the U.N. impose targeted sanctions on the North Korean leaders responsible for its human rights crimes. However, China blocks U.N. action.
Without U.N. action, the United States must act, using our position as the steward of the global financial system. The U.N. Special Rapporteur on North Korea welcomes such action, supporting targeted sanctions against those most responsible for its heinous crimes against humanity.