North Korea Sanctions Enforcement Act of 2016
Floor Speech
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Ms. COLLINS. Madam President, I wish to speak in support of the North Korea Sanctions Enforcement Act.
Last week, North Korea launched a space satellite into orbit in direct violation of U.N. sanctions. Last month, North Korea tested its fourth nuclear bomb since 2006. North Korea's steady march toward expanding its nuclear arsenal continues unabated. Even more troubling is North Korea's willingness to sell its nuclear and ballistic missile technology to the highest bidder, as demonstrated by its previous cooperation with Iran.
The North Korea Sanctions Enforcement Act is an appropriate and timely measure to expand U.S. sanctions against not only North Korea, but also those that facilitate North Korea's illicit and nefarious activities. In doing so, this legislation will deliver the message to the North Korean regime that its continued development and proliferation of nuclear weapons, material, and delivery systems will not be tolerated.
At the same time, the United Nations Security Council must address this issue with the same sense of urgency, unity, and commitment that the House has shown and the Senate will demonstrate in passing this bill later today.
First, U.N. member countries must fully understand and implement the many existing sanctions against North Korea already on the books. Unless they do, the sanctions will never work. The United States has minimal trade with North Korea, whereas China, a permanent member of the U.N. Security Council, accounts for 70 percent of all of North Korea's economic trade.
Yesterday, a new report released by a panel of U.N. experts found that North Korea continues to evade international sanctions because the sanctions have been seldom implemented, and some countries do not fully understand their obligations under the relevant U.N. Security Council resolutions. In other instances, there is simply a lack of political will to enforce the sanctions. This has to stop for sanctions to be effective against North Korea.
Second, the U.N. Security Council must adopt new sanctions to demonstrate to the North Korean regime that further violations of U.N. sanctions will not be tolerated. Even though North Korea has continued to evade sanctions for the past decade, the response at the United Nations should be to identify the ways to make sanctions more effective and targeted rather than to walk away from sanctions entirely.
We know sanctions can work because they have before. In 2005, the U.S. Treasury Department froze $24 million in North Korean accounts important to the regime at the Banco Delta Asia bank. As a result of this action, which was taken pursuant to authority Congress provided in the USA PATRIOT Act, the North Koreans returned to the six-party nuclear talks. They stayed at the talks until the frozen assets were released 2 years later.
The bill we are considering today requires the Department of the Treasury to reevaluate whether North Korea should be considered a primary money-laundering concern, which would permit the President to enact the same type of sanctions that brought the North Koreans back to the negotiating table 10 years ago. I urge the Treasury Department to complete this review as quickly as possible so that the President has at his disposal the full array of options to persuade, coerce, and effectively contain the dangerous North Korean regime.
I thank Chairman Corker and Ranking Member Cardin for bringing this measure to the floor, and I thank Senator Gardner and Senator Menendez as well for their extensive work on this legislation to address the nuclear threat posed by the erratic and unstable North Korean regime.
I urge my colleagues to support this vital, bipartisan legislation.
We must exhaust every diplomatic option we have to pressure North Korea to abandon its nuclear weapons program, halt its aggressive military posturing with South Korea, and adhere to the tenets of international human rights law. That is why I strongly support the bipartisan effort to strengthen sanctions on the rogue North Korean regime.
These sanctions are an important tool in resolving the growing threat from Pyongyang. The legislation before the Senate would help prevent North Korea from obtaining goods or technology related to nuclear weapons, ban foreign assistance to any country that provides lethal military equipment to North Korea, and target the country's trade in key industrial commodities. These steps are absolutely essential if we are to achieve our longstanding mission to end the North's nuclear weapons program. Certainly, sanctions are far preferable to preemptive military force, which I strongly oppose.
In addition to sanctions, the U.S. must work with the few nations that have diplomatic and economic relationships with North Korea-- namely China--to pressure Kim Jong Un to stop threatening the stability of the region and join the community of nations. While China may have been a steadfast ally of North Korea's in the past, China now has far more shared interests with the U.S. than with Pyongyang. It is time to make resolving the Korean peninsula conflict a top diplomatic goal in terms of our own relationship with China.
I am pleased to see that the sanctions bill includes a waiver to allow humanitarian organizations to deliver much needed relief to ordinary North Korean citizens and authorizes $2 million for humanitarian assistance. Sanctions come at a cost, and we must do everything possible to make sure the North Korean people--who already suffer so much under Kim Jong Un--do not pay an even greater price.
While I will be necessarily absent for the expected bipartisan passage of the bill, I strongly support the North Korea sanctions legislation.
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