WASHINGTON Reuters -- The United States has imposed extensive human rights-related sanctions on dozens of people and entities tied to China, Myanmar, North Korea and Bangladesh and added Chinese artificial intelligence company SenseTime Group to an investment blacklist.
Canada and the United Kingdom joined the US in imposing sanctions related to human rights abuse in Myanmar, while Washington imposed the first new sanctions on North Korea under President Joe Biden's administration and targeted Myanmar military entities in action on Human Rights Day.
Our actions today, especially those in partnership with the United Kingdom and Canada, send a message that democracies around the world will act against those who abuse the power of the state to inflict suffering and repression, said Wally Adeyemo, Deputy Treasury Secretary.
The North Korean mission at the United Nations and the Chinese, Myanmar and Bangladesh embassies in Washington didn't respond immediately to requests for comment.
The U.S. Treasury Department added Chinese artificial intelligence company SenseTime to a list of Chinese military-industrial complexes accusing it of having developed facial recognition programs that can determine a target's ethnicity, with a focus on identifying ethnic Uyghurs.
It will fall under an investment ban for U.S. investors.
More than a million people, mainly Uyghurs and members of other Muslim minorities, have been detained in a vast network of camps in China's far-west region of Xinjiang in recent years, according to UN experts and rights groups.
China denies abuses in Xinjiang but the U.S. government and many rights groups say Beijing is carrying out genocide there.
The Treasury said that the Central Public Prosecutors Office in North Korea had been appointed, along with the former Minister of Social Security, and recently assigned Minister of People's Armed Forces Ri Yong Gil.
U.S. President Joe Biden gathered more than 100 world leaders at a virtual summit this week and made a plea to bolster democracies around the world, calling safeguarding rights and freedoms the defining challenge of the current era.