MADRID, Dec. 9 (EUROPA PRESS) –
The United States Department of the Treasury announced this Friday new travel sanctions and asset freezes against 40 individuals and organizations from nine countries around the world for Human Rights abuses and corruption practices, coinciding with the commemorations of the International Day Against Corruption and Human Rights Day, respectively on Friday and Saturday.
These sanctions are part of the so-called Global Magnitsky Human Rights Responsibility Law, by which the United States declares itself capable of unilaterally prosecuting foreign citizens accused of acts of corruption or violations of fundamental rights.
Among the entities sanctioned stands out, for example, the General Office of the Border Guard of the Ministry of State Security of North Korea, accomplices in practices of “forced labor, torture and other violations and abuses of Human Rights at the hands of the Government”.
The United States has also sanctioned two Chinese officials over policy in the Tibet Autonomous Region, one of them the director of the Tibetan Public Security Bureau (the ‘de facto’ police chief), Zhang Hongbo, who was involved in “serious abuses against human rights, including in detention centers run by the TPSB, scarred 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 on the so-called Engel List of the United States, accused of corruption. The sanctions this Friday 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 Congress Allan Estuardo Rodriguez Reyes, the deputy Jorge Estuardo Vargas Morales or the former Minister of Energy and Mines, Luis Alfonso Chang Navarro.
As regards the African continent, it highlights the sanctions against the former Guinean president Alpha Conde, who was overthrown in a coup in September 2021 and under whose presidency, according to the US, “security forces committed acts of violence against supporters of the opposition”. The US also sanctions Karim Keita, son of former Mali President Ibrahim Boubacar Keita and former Chairman of the Security and Defense Commission of the National Assembly of Mali.
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 various Russian officials involved, during the invasion of Ukraine, in the so-called “acts leak”: interrogations and searches against the Ukrainian civilian population in Russian-occupied territories.
Among them, it points 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 Russian Federation citizens Ochur-Suge Terimovich Mongush and Lyudmila Nikolaevna Zaitseva, both allegedly involved in torture, the former while Zaitseva was involved in “the abduction and forcible removal of children from Ukraine”.
