The US announced a slew of fresh rights-abuse measures against senior officials and entities in eight countries on Friday, with targets ranging from a Chinese face recognition technology firm to a massive North Korean cartoon studio.
Officials accused of abetting the crackdown on anti-coup protestors in Myanmar, the oppression of Muslim Uyghurs in China’s Xinjiang region, and political violence in Bangladesh under the guise of a drug war were targeted in the sanctions, which were announced on International Human Rights Day and were backed in part by Britain and Canada.
“Our measures today, particularly those taken in collaboration with the United Kingdom and Canada, send a message that democracies all around the world will take action against those who misuse state power to inflict pain and persecution,” the US Treasury Department said.
It claimed that two ethnic Uyghur political figures in Xinjiang, Shohrat Zakir and Erken Tuniyaz, as well as China’s artificial intelligence corporation SenseTime, were involved in widespread mistreatment of Uyghurs.
Surveillance in Xinjiang
Tuniyaz is the current acting chairman of China’s Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region, which Zakir led from at least 2018 until 2021.
Zakir has defended the prison camps, claiming that they are “education facilities” where inmates may learn Mandarin and the “real essence of Islam.”
International human rights organisations, on the other hand, have described them as a key tool in the Chinese government’s “genocidal” policy against Uyghurs.
“The widespread arrest of Uyghurs is part of (Chinese) authorities’ effort to construct a police state in the Xinjiang area through detentions and data-driven surveillance,” the Treasury said.
According to the Treasury, SenseTime’s facial recognition systems were created in part to be deployed against Uyghurs and other primarily Muslim minorities in Xinjiang, where over one million people have been imprisoned in camps.
The move added to the pressure on SenseTime, which was prepared to list its shares in an initial public offering on Hong Kong’s stock exchange next week.
The company had already been placed on the US Department of Commerce’s blacklist in 2019 because its equipment had been used for widespread surveillance in Xinjiang, which Washington claims is part of China’s “military-industrial complex.”
North Korea was the first target of Biden’s sanctions.
The Treasury Department today issued the first fresh US sanctions against North Korea since President Joe Biden entered office, following months of attempts to engage Pyongyang in nuclear talks.
Treasury accused North Korea’s government-run animation studio, SEK Studio, as well as organisations and persons connected to it, of exploiting North Korean workers in order to gain much-needed foreign cash and escape sanctions on the country.
SEK Studio has a worldwide reputation and has worked on big-budget animated films such as Disney’s “Pocahontas” and “The Lion King.”
Ri Yong Gil, the North Korean Minister of People’s Armed Forces, was also sanctioned.
Sanctions and blacklisting can restrict persons from obtaining US visas, block assets under US jurisdiction, and prevent targets from conducting business with US individuals or businesses, thereby shutting them out of the US banking system.
Myanmar and Bangladesh
In addition, the Treasury added four Myanmar state and regional chief ministers to its sanctions blacklist on Human Rights Day 2021, accusing them of participating in “brutal crackdowns” on Myanmar citizens.
Rapid Action Battalion, a Bangladeshi internal security organisation accused of participation in hundreds of disappearances and almost 600 extrajudicial deaths since 2018, was also named.
Six members of the Rapid Action Battalion, both present and past, were also sanctioned.
In a related step, the US State Department stated on Friday that 12 officials from China, Uganda, Belarus, Bangladesh, Sri Lanka, and Mexico had been placed on a no-fly list “for their involvement in egregious human rights violations.”
“We are committed to putting human rights at the centre of our foreign policy, and we reaffirm this commitment by using relevant instruments and authorities to raise awareness of and encourage responsibility for human rights violations and abuses,” Secretary of State Antony Blinken stated.
