North Korea Sanctions Enforcement Act of 2016

Floor Speech

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Ms. GABBARD. Mr. Speaker, I am rising today in strong support of H.R. 757, the North Korea Sanctions Enforcement Act, which I am proud to be a cosponsor of.

North Korea continues to pose a serious and dangerous threat to my constituents in Hawaii, the Pacific, and the West Coast of the United States. Our communities and our families lie within range of North Korea's intercontinental ballistic missiles.

North Korea's nuclear tests just a wintercontinental-ballistic-missileseek ago and their continued pursuit of developing more nuclear weapons and miniaturizing those weapons serve as a reminder of the threat that North Korea poses to our country, which my constituents in Hawaii know all too well.

There are some necessary steps that the United States must take to deal with this threat: We need to increase the strength and capabilities of our Pacific fleet and forces. We need to stop the downward trend in investment of ballistic missile defense development and capabilities, and strengthen our ballistic missile defense capabilities, specifically in Hawaii and the Pacific, to counter this threat. We need to completely reexamine our strategy of so-called strategic patience with North Korea, recognizing that North Korea has continued to grow in their nuclear and missile capabilities, telling us that the status quo is not working.

This bill, however, deals with another important area where we need to act, and that is sanctions. It gives us the tools to respond to North Korea's provocations. One provision would apply sanctions that prohibit the export of munitions to North Korea and severely restrict export licenses for controlled goods and technologies. It would prohibit financial transactions between U.S. persons and the Government of North Korea and sanction those who send or receive lethal military equipment to or from North Korea.

The bill will also give us the tools to reapply some of the most effective sanctions that we have ever had against hard currency for those who do business with North Korea. We saw how these sanctions were effective before.

Following U.S. action against the Banco Delta Asia based in Macao in 2005, the assets of North Korean banks and leaders were frozen and completely blocked from the international financial system. This directly affected the money being used to develop these nuclear and ballistic missile capabilities, and the money also supported the regime's leadership and its elites and their lifestyle.

This severely increased the pressure in North Korea, causing them to engage with the international community, coming to an agreement to lift the sanctions in 2007--prematurely, in my view--made in exchange for shutting down and sealing the Yongbyon nuclear facilities and discussing a list of its nuclear-related activities with the U.S. and other parties in the region.

The agreement was violated by North Korea in 2009 when they tested a missile, and the sanctions on Banco Delta showed us earlier a way to impact North Korean leadership and business directly. Those sanctions should have been immediately reinstated upon North Korea breaking that agreement, but that is why we are here today--to act.

While sanctions alone are not enough, this bill could provide some very important tools to countering North Korea's aggression and ultimately achieving our objective of a denuclearized North Korea.

Lastly, this bill recognizes the terrible human rights abuses inflicted on the people of North Korea. For many years, State Department human rights reports, as well as private organizations' reports, have depicted a pattern of extreme human rights abuses by the tyrannical North Korean regime, including the denial of basic human freedoms: withheld access to food and deplorable prison camps where extrajudicial killings, enslavement, torture, and sexual abuse are widespread.

I would like to thank our Chairman Royce and our Ranking Member Engel for their steadfast, bipartisan dedication and leadership to taking action on this global and domestic security issue. This bill provides a critical step forward.

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