North Korea Sanctions Enforcement Act of 2016

Floor Speech

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Mr. SMITH of New Jersey. Mr. Speaker, I thank the distinguished chairman for yielding.

I rise in strong support of H.R. 757, the North Korea Sanctions Enforcement Act of 2016.

Mr. Speaker, there is a compelling need to pass tough and effective legislation to freeze the assets of the Kim Jong-un regime.

I want to commend Chairman Royce for his long and hard work on North Korea and his 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 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 to keep on proliferating? They will not allow intrusive inspections because they cheat and because it weakens their status at home. They use nuclear weapons negotiations to enhance their own diplomatic status and to gain concessions.

In the end, nuclear negotiations earn rogue nations like Iran and North Korea foreign capital and other investments from the West. They use that to fund additional missile technology, to fund criminal and terrorist activities, and to continue with clandestine nuclear programs.

During the Bush administration, the most effective tools in bringing the North Korea dictatorship to heel were the freezing of its assets in the Banco Delta Asia in Macao and the building of an international coalition to interdict suspect North Korea shipping. These should be our priorities now, especially 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, as well proliferation.

Nearly 2 years ago, the U.N. Commission of Inquiry reported that the 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, and racial, and 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 that he cares even less about the welfare of the people of Japan, South Korea, 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 U.S. 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 of those most responsible for these heinous crimes against humanity.

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