The U.S. Treasury Department on Friday announced new travel sanctions and asset freezes against 40 individuals and organizations from nine countries around the world for human rights abuses and corrupt practices, coinciding with the commemorations of International Anti-Corruption Day and Human Rights Day, respectively on Friday and Saturday.
These sanctions are part of the so-called Global Magnitsky Human Rights Accountability Act under which the United States declares itself empowered to unilaterally prosecute foreign nationals accused of acts of corruption or violations of fundamental rights.
Among the entities sanctioned is, for example, the General Office of the Border Guard of the North Korean Ministry of State Security, complicit in practices of «forced labor, torture and other human rights violations and abuses at the hands of the Government».
The United States has also sanctioned two Chinese policy makers in the Tibet Autonomous Region, one of them the director of the Tibetan Public Security Bureau (the ‘de facto’ police chief), Zhang Hongbo, involved in «serious human rights abuses, including in TPSB-run detention facilities marked by torture, physical abuse, and murder of prisoners.»
In the case of El Salvador, the United States imposes sanctions on its Minister of Labor, Oscar Rolando Castro, included in 2021 in the so-called Engel List of the United States, accused of corruption. This Friday’s sanctions also target the former legal secretary of the Presidency, Conan Tonathiu Castro Ramirez, also on the previous list.
For Guatemala, the United States points to the former president of the Congress Allan Estuardo Rodriguez Reyes, the congressman Jorge Estuardo Vargas Morales or the former Minister of Energy and Mines, Luis Alfonso Chang Navarro.
As far as the African continent is concerned, the sanctions against former Guinean President Alpha Condé, ousted in a coup d’état in September 2021 and under whose presidency, according to the US, «security forces committed acts of violence against opposition supporters», stand out. The US also sanctions Karim Keita, son of former Malian President Ibrahim Boubacar Keita and former chairman of the Security and Defense Committee of the Malian National Assembly.
Finally, as far as Russia is concerned, the US has sanctioned all 15 members of the country’s National Electoral Commission for contributing to the holding of fraudulent elections, and several Russian officials involved, during the invasion of Ukraine, in the so-called «acts of filtration»: interrogations and searches of the Ukrainian civilian population in Russian-occupied territories.
Among them, he singles out, for example, the heads of the Presidential Administration of the Russian Federation Oleg Yurievich Nesterov and Yevgeni Radionovich Kim as «direct participants in the planning and implementation» of these protocols.
The State Department also sanctioned citizens of the Russian Federation Ochur-Suge Terimovich Mongush and Lyudmila Nikolaevna Zaitseva , both allegedly involved in torture, the former, while Zaitseva was involved in «the abduction and forcible transfer of children from Ukraine».
