North Korean officials vowed Thursday to retaliate against the United States after Washington slapped new sanctions on the nation’s leader Kim Jong Un over human rights abuses.
Pyongyang called the U.S. sanctions a "hideous crime" that constituted a "declaration of war," according to North Korea’s state-run KCNA news agency.
The Obama administration blacklisted Kim along with 10 other regime officials and five government entities Wednesday for the first time over Pyongyang’s role in torturing and censoring citizens, among other human rights violations. The Treasury Department sanctions freeze their U.S. assets and bar Americans from doing business with them.
"What the U.S. did this time, not content with malignantly slandering the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea, is the worst crime that can never be pardoned," North Korea’s foreign ministry said, according to KCNA.
Both the U.S. and the United Nations have tightened pressure on North Korea since Pyongyang carried out its fourth nuclear weapons test in January. The UN Security Council in March passed the most expansive sanctions to date on the isolated nation.
U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon, a former South Korean foreign minister, is hoping that China will pressure its North Korean ally to cooperate on human rights despite Beijing’s own abysmal human rights record, according to Reuters.
China’s foreign ministry said Beijing was opposed to the U.S. sanctions, arguing that the condition of human rights in North Korea does not threaten international peace and security. China has attempted to block the issue from being reviewed at the UN Security Council.
North Korea is already bound by U.S. sanctions for prior nuclear and ballistic missile tests, but the Treasury Department’s latest freeze marks the first time Washington has blacklisted regime officials over human rights abuses.
"The government continues to commit extrajudicial killings, enforced disappearances, arbitrary arrest and detention, forced labor, and torture," State Department spokesman John Kirby said in a statement Wednesday announcing the sanctions.