Britain announced on Monday economic sanctions against individuals and organizations in Russia, Saudi Arabia, Myanmar and North Korea under new UK powers to punish human rights violators.
Foreign Secretary Dominic Raab said the sanctions were aimed at those behind “some of the most notorious human rights violations in recent years.”
They include senior Saudi intelligence officials accused of involvement in the murder of journalist Jamal Khashoggi at the Saudi Arabian Consulate in Istanbul, and Russian authorities implicated in the death of Sergei Magnitsky, a lawyer who died in a Moscow prison after exposing a tax fraud scheme involving Russian officials. .
In this 2014 file photo, Saudi journalist Jamal Khashoggi speaks during a press conference in Manama, Bahrain. (AP)
Also on the list of 49 individuals and organizations is Min Aung Hlaing, Commander-in-Chief of the Myanmar Armed Forces, and Commander of the Myanmar Army, Soe Win. They are accused of orchestrating systematic violence against the Rohingya minority in Myanmar.
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North Korean organizations, the State Ministry’s Security Bureau and the Correctional Bureau of the People’s Security Ministry, were sanctioned for running prison camps in the authoritarian communist state.
Britain has previously imposed sanctions as part of the European Union or under the auspices of the United Nations. Since leaving the EU in January, she has implemented her own version of the United States’ Magnitsky Act, which allows authorities to ban or confiscate property from people guilty of human rights abuses.
UK law authorizes the British government to prevent sanctioned persons from entering the country, channeling money through British banks, or benefiting from the UK economy.
“You cannot set foot in this country, and we will take advantage of your battered blood-soaked profits if you try,” Raab said when he announced the new sanctions.
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Britain’s Foreign Secretary Dominic Raab announced targeted economic sanctions against individuals and organizations in Russia, Saudi Arabia, Myanmar and North Korea under new UK powers to punish human rights violators. (AP)
Government and opposition lawmakers welcomed the measures, although some questioned why Chinese officials had not been included, given Hong Kong’s new law on security and repression in the western region of Xinjjang. More than one million people in Xinjiang, belonging to ethnic groups including Uighurs, Kazakhs and Kyrgyz, have been detained in a vast network of detention centers.
Conservative lawmaker Tom Tugendhat, who heads the Commons’ Foreign Affairs Committee, said there had been “remarkable silence about human rights violations in China.”
Raab said more people would be added to the sanctions list, but that he would not “avoid what the next wave of designations would be.”
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Leonid Slutsky, head of the foreign affairs committee in the lower house of the Russian parliament, denounced the sanctions as “Russophobic nonsense” and said Moscow reserves the right to take “well balanced” retaliatory action.
“London has made another move towards the degradation of relations between Russia and the United Kingdom,” he said, according to Russian news agencies.
