House lawmakers passed new sanctions legislation on Thursday designed to undercut North Korea’s economy by cracking down on the network of banks and industries that help it avoid western sanctions.
“If we shut down their economy, they can’t move forward with their [nuclear weapons program] program,” House Foreign Affairs Committee chairman Ed Royce, R-Calif., said Thursday on Fox.
The House easily passed the legislation in a 419-1 vote.
The sanctions bill sharpens the warning against collaborating with North Korea that Secretary of State Rex Tillerson issued last week at a special meeting of the United Nations Security Council. Tillerson threatened to impose sanctions on entities that help North Korea circumvent international sanctions.
The bill, called the Korea Interdiction and Modernization of Sanctions Act, targets anyone who buys North Korean products beyond legal limits or who helps provide indirect access to the international banking system.
“Kim Jong Un is exceedingly crafty,” New York Rep. Eliot Engel, the top Democrat on the Foreign Affairs Committee, said while touting the sanctions update. “When we make sanctions tougher, they come up with new ways to get around them: phony bank accounts, fake companies overseas, shipments under foreign flags. So we need to go back to the well, to close the loopholes that the regime exploits. That’s what this measure does.”
The closing of those sanctions could require the United States to target Chinese entities in particular, a potentially-controversial measure as the Trump administration tries to work with China to curb the North Korean nuclear weapons program.
“So it’s a pressure campaign that has a knob on it,” Tillerson said Wednesday during an address to State Department staff. “I’d say we’re at about dial setting 5 or 6 right now, with a strong call of countries all over the world to fully implement the UN Security Council resolutions regarding sanctions, because no one has ever fully implemented those. So we’re going to lean into people to fully implement them.”
