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Obama blacklists N. Korea for human trafficking

October 19, 2015

President Barack Obama answers a question during a joint news conference with South Korean President Park Geun-hye in the East Room of the White House in Washington, Friday, Oct. 16, 2015. (AP Photo/Pablo Martinez Monsivais)

WASHINGTON (Yonhap) — U.S. President Barack Obama has included North Korea again on a blacklist of countries accused of human trafficking, extending a symbolic ban on provisions of U.S. funding for the communist nation for another year.

In a “presidential determination” issued Friday, Obama blacklisted the North, Equatorial Guinea, Iran, South Sudan, Venezuela, Yemen and Zimbabwe as countries failing to meet the minimum standards under the Trafficking Victims Protection Act of 2000.

The designation bans the U.S. government from providing “certain funding for those countries’ governments for Fiscal Year (FY) 2016, until such governments comply with the minimum standards or make significant efforts to bring themselves into compliance.”

The restriction, however, is expected to be symbolic only as the U.S. provides no fund for the North.

In July, the U.S. State Department designated North Korea as one of the world’s worst countries for human trafficking for the 13th straight year, calling it “a source country for men, women and children who are subjected to forced labor and sex trafficking.”

The State Department’s annual “Trafficking in Persons Report” put North Korea in the lowest Tier 3 of its four-step classification of countries, saying the communist regime maintains political prison camps and sends people overseas for forced labor.