Daniel Jasper speaks at "Off-Ramps to War: Paths to Building Peace with North Korea." Carl Roose / AFSC
Chairman Van Hollen, Ranking Member Hyde-Smith, and Members of the Committee, thank you for the opportunity to submit testimony. My name is Daniel Jasper and I am the Asia Public Education and Advocacy Coordinator for the American Friends Service Committee (AFSC). We are a peace and social justice organization that has worked for over a hundred years to address the root causes of violence and conflict throughout the world. We appreciate the opportunity to address the use of sanctions before the Subcommittee today, as this foreign policy tool now serves as a primary response to geopolitical conflict. Specifically, my testimony addresses 1) report language addressing the need for the Government Accountability Office (GAO) to conduct impact assessments on comprehensive sanctions regimes, and 2) the need for the Treasury Department’s Office of Foreign Assets Control (OFAC) to conduct regular and comprehensive reporting on licensing procedures.
The urgency and importance of conducting impact assessments on comprehensive sanctions regimes cannot be understated. In 2021, The Treasury Department’s sanctions review found that sanctions designations have risen from 912 to 9,421 in the last two decades, representing an increase of 933%.1 However, despite this accelerating rate of usage, government agencies have indicated that the impact of sanctions is often unclear.
According to a 2019 GAO report, implementing and relevant agencies only conduct ad hoc assessments and do not monitor “the overall effectiveness of existing sanctions programs in achieving broad policy goals.” The report found that officials only “informally” evaluate the overall efficacy of these measures. However, given the immense impact of sanctions on ordinary civilians and the global economy, informal evaluations are grossly insufficient. Notably, officials indicated that one major reason for the lack of comprehensive assessments is that “there is no policy or requirement” for this type of analysis.2 It’s clear, then, that until Congress enacts such a policy, the executive branch is unlikely to undertake such critical assessments on its own accord.
Throughout AFSC’s more than one hundred-year history, the organization has accompanied countless communities under sanctions regimes and borne witness to the varied impacts of these measures. Our organization, for instance, was among the first to support South Africans in their call to sanction the apartheid regime. While the case of South Africa has been considered a success, we have found that critical to that success was that it was led by the impacted communities themselves.
Conversely, we have seen that the impacts of these measures are far more damaging when implemented unilaterally and without the support of the local population. In recent decades, the U.S.’ propensity to unilaterally impose comprehensive sanctions without the support of local civil society efforts has created large pockets of vulnerable communities throughout the world.
These communities - in many cases entire nations like the Democratic People's Republic of Korea (or “North Korea”), Iran, Venezuela, and Cuba - are left in a state of arrested and reversing development. Given the mounting global challenges such as the COVID-19 pandemic and global food supply chain disruptions, these communities represent an open wound on the collective body of humanity. It is in these conditions that viruses mutate, conflict arises, human rights are violated, humanitarian crises develop, and violent ideologies take root. It is, therefore, imperative that the Subcommittee act to fill this immense gap in monitoring and evaluation as policymakers must understand the true impacts of these widespread tools.
Here, I would like to stress that while administration officials have stated that there are humanitarian exemptions for comprehensive sanctions regimes, in practice these exemptions are insufficient for aid operations and peacebuilding initiatives.
For instance, AFSC has operated the longest-standing NGO program in North Korea since 1980. Prior to the pandemic, our program worked to improve conservation agricultural techniques in four cooperative farms outside of the capital city of Pyongyang. These activities had over 84,000 direct and indirect beneficiaries as we worked to improve food access for local communities.
We have witnessed many impacts of sanctions in our work on the ground in places like North Korea such as a chronic shortage of basic supplies, increases in manual labor, decreases in the availability of transportation and fuel, and a general attitude of resentment toward the U.S. government. A recent and dramatic example of the impact of sanctions was the increasingly restricted space for the delivery of humanitarian assistance since 2017.
As a consequence of the U.S.’ “maximum pressure” campaign and a U.S.-led UN sanctions resolution, we witnessed deeply disturbing situations where lifesaving assistance to North Korea was delayed or denied by bureaucratic procedures. In at least 42 instances, aid operations were severely disrupted even in cases where agencies obtained the correct paperwork. This resulted in patients undergoing surgery without anesthesia, children going without nutritional assistance, and increased mortality risks for a population already on the margins. While some of these issues
have been resolved, the damage to key humanitarian channels had been done; relationships and operations were largely unable to recover in the years leading up to the pandemic.3
As the COVID-19 outbreak erupted in China in early 2020, North Korea largely closed its borders to incoming travel and cargo and has continued these border closures throughout the first half of 2022. Despite a “maximum pressure” campaign and over two years of a self-imposed
embargo, North Korea’s missile and weapons development programs - a primary target of sanctions measures - continue unabated. Instead, AFSC has witnessed that it is the ordinary people, who have no say in their government’s actions, that often bear the true cost of sanctions.
In 2019, Korea Peace Now, a global movement of women mobilizing to end the Korean War, commissioned one of the few assessments of the impact of sanctions on citizens. The study found that “[s]anctions destabilize North Korean society in ways that have a disproportionate impact on women, resonating with patterns observed in other sanctioned countries. The resulting economic pressure tends to exacerbate rates of domestic violence, sexual violence, and the trafficking and prostitution of women.”4 These types of impacts on the human rights and humanitarian situations of local communities are seldom captured by the “informal” impact assessments offered by administration officials.
At the beginning of the Biden administration, 55 nongovernmental organizations - representing over 65 million supporters - sent a letter to the President outlining urgently needed sanctions reforms. Among the key recommendations included in the letter was the need to institute “ongoing reporting protocols that monitor the impact and human cost of sanctions.”5
The administration has not taken action on these reforms to date, and with millions of lives in the balance, Congress must champion the voice of civil society and institute common sense monitoring policies. We strongly urge the Subcommittee to adopt report language requesting impact assessments on all comprehensive sanctions regimes from the GAO.
In many heavily sanctioned contexts such as North Korea, it is now routine for aid operations to go through extensive OFAC licensing procedures to send aid shipments. Throughout my tenure at AFSC, I have seen this process take anywhere from nine months to two years.
The application process is strenuous - often filled with vague guidance on high-stakes procedures. Communication and status updates are typically infrequent from OFAC and the process requires the aid of expensive legal counsel. Further, OFAC staff turnover and/or the sheer volume of applications mean that we are continuously educating policymakers and bureaucrats about our work. This means that in moments of humanitarian crisis (and sometimes in moments of geopolitical opportunity), aid workers are spending precious moments navigating red tape and re-hashing the most basic elements of longstanding programs instead of responding to critical situations.
Consistent with the Treasury Department’s commitment to “modernizing” sanction regimes and supporting legitimate humanitarian actors6, OFAC must begin regular and transparent reporting on licensing procedures. Moreover, making this data publicly available would improve the speed and consistency of these processes, reduce humanitarian response time, and improve our collective understanding of the impacts of sanctions on civilians.
Amid increasing global security challenges, sanctions have emerged as a primary tool of the U.S. in dealing with its adversaries. These tools are sometimes enacted with an alarmingly cavalier attitude toward their potentially devastating human impact, and with a severe lack of oversight.
Given the widespread nature of these instruments, their impact on the global economy, and the hundreds of millions of lives they impact, we urge you to support these proposals in order for the U.S. government and public to fully understand the consequences of these policies.
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1 2021 Sanctions Review. U.S. Department of Treasury, Oct. 2021, https://home.treasury.gov/system/files/136/Treasury-2021-sanctions-revie....
2 Economic Sanctions: Agencies Assess Impacts on Targets, and Studies Suggest Several Factors Contribute to Sanctions’ Effectiveness. U.S. Government Accountability Office, Oct. 2019, https://www.gao.gov/assets/gao-20- 145.pdf.
3 Jasper, Daniel. “Why the World Should Care about the COVID Outbreak in North Korea - 38 North: Informed Analysis of North Korea.” 38 North, 27 May 2022, https://www.38north.org/2022/05/why-the-world-should-care- about-the-covid-outbreak-in-north-korea/.
4 “The Human Cost and Gendered Impact of Sanctions on North Korea.” Korea Peace Now. Oct. 2019, https://koreapeacenow.org/wp-content/uploads/2019/10/human-costs-and-gen... korea.pdf.
5 “Civil Society Groups Call on Biden to Provide Immediate Sanctions Relief and Legal Reform.” American Friends Service Committee, 26 Mar. 2021, https://www.afsc.org/newsroom/civil-society-groups-call-biden-to-provide- immediate-sanctions-relief-and-legal-reform.
6 2021 Sanctions Review. U.S. Department of Treasury, Oct. 2021, https://home.treasury.gov/system/files/136/Treasury-2021-sanctions-revie....