The United States has newly sanctioned North Korean and Chinese individuals and entities for human rights violations.

On Friday, which marked Human Rights Day, the Office of Foreign Assets Control under the U.S. Treasury said ten entities and 15 individuals including from Myanmar and Russia, have been added to the sanctions list.

This includes North Korea's Central Public Prosecutors Office and its defense minister Ri Yong-gil.

The Treasury Department said that North Korean people suffer from forced labor, constant surveillance and severe restrictions to freedom and human rights.

It said the central prosecutors office and the regime's judicial system carry out fundamentally unfair trials that often end in sentencing to notorious prison camps.

The defense minister, who was the former minister of social security, was also sanctioned for similar reasons.

The Treasury also noted the death of Otto Warmbier, an American university student who died in 2017 after returning home in a coma from a yearlong detention in North Korea. 

The department said the treatment and eventual death of Warmbier was reprehensible and the North must be held to account for its abysmal human rights record.

It has also sanctioned foreign entities for violating UN Security Council resolutions that prohibit member states from employing or hosting North Korean workers who are abused as a source for foreign currency earnings.

The latest designations also include the military junta in Myanmar for its February coup and subsequent tyrannical rule as well as organizations and officials connected to China's human rights abuses against Uyghurs in Xinjiang.

[Photo : YONHAP News]