Yonhap
6/16/2006
Japan’s parliament on Friday passed a bill that requires the government to impose economic sanctions on North Korea unless it improves its human rights situation and resolves the issue of its abduction of Japanese citizens in past decades.
The new law will take effect in one month after going through the due administrative process. The enactment received approval from the ruling Liberal Democratic Party and its coalition New Komeito Party and the major opposition Democratic Party.
The enactment is the third in a series of economic sanctions Tokyo has imposed to cause North Korea to return Japanese citizens who were abducted from the late 1970s to the early 1980s. Japan revised pertinent laws in 2004 to enable the government to ban money transfers to North Korea without U.N. approval and restrict North Korean ships from entering Japanese ports in 2004.
The new law on North Korean human rights stipulates the abduction issue as a “national duty” that the government has to take. It says if Pyongyang does not make progress on the issue, Tokyo should mobilize economic sanctions on the communist country, provide help for North Korean defectors and offer financial aid to non-governmental organizations helping the defectors. The law set a week in December as a publicity week for the government to enlighten the public on the North Korea issue and required the government to submit an annual report on its efforts to deal with it.
Earlier in the day, the European Parliament passed a resolution that called on the international community to make efforts to improve the human rights situation in North Korea. The resolution, passed in a plenary session in Strasbourg, France, particularly urged Pyongyang to release information about the whereabouts of Son Jong-nam, a 48-year-old North Korean man who was arrested for spilling tales about the situation in the North to his brother in China and sentenced to death.
From the BBC:
Japan’s parliament has passed a bill calling for economic sanctions against North Korea unless a dispute over kidnapped Japanese citizens is solved.
The North Korea Human Rights Bill calls for sanctions to be imposed if no progress is made on the abduction and other human rights issues.
It could be enacted by Friday, as both ruling and opposition parties back it.
But the bill does not specify how progress would be assessed or set a deadline for imposing sanctions.
Japanese Prime Minister Junichiro Koizumi has been cautious on the issue of imposing sanctions against North Korea in the past, analysts say.
“The government will take into consideration international trends comprehensively,” the bill said.
The sanctions would include money transfers from North Koreans in Japan, an important source of funds for the North.
‘Worst phase’
The bill was passed just hours after North Korea warned Japan against continuing to bring up the abduction issue.
As already clarified by the DPRK more than once, the ‘abduction issue’ had been completely settled
North Korean spokesman
A spokesman from the North Korean Foreign Ministry said that relations between the two nations were at “the worst phase in history”.
The spokesman said the blame lay with Japan for its attempts to internationalise the abduction issue, state news agency KCNA reported.
Pyongyang has admitted kidnapping 13 Japanese citizens in the 1970s and 80s and used them to train its agents.
Five of the 13 abductees were allowed to return to Japan in October 2002, but North Korea said that the other 8 people had died.
It says the issue has now been resolved.
“As already clarified by the DPRK more than once, the ‘abduction issue’ had been completely settled thanks to its sincere efforts,” the Foreign Ministry spokesman said.
But Japan believes North Korea is not being completely honest about whether the abductees are still alive and how many of its citizens it abducted.
The issue has sparked public anger in Japan and has dogged relations between the two countries for years.
