Robbie Gramer
The Biden administration is sitting on dozens of potential sanctions for human rights violators and coup-plotters in countries in Africa, refusing to pull the trigger despite mounting pressure from U.S. lawmakers and human rights advocates, according to seven officials, congressional aides, and experts familiar with the matter.
The U.S. State Department has extensive dockets for possible sanctions on people involved in grave human rights violations in countries including South Sudan; Ethiopia, where a deadly internal war has raged for nearly two years; and Sudan, where security officials helped plot a coup last year and then unleashed a deadly crackdown on pro-democracy protests, the officials and experts said. For reasons that are unclear to U.S. lawmakers and outside advocacy organizations, the Biden administration has yet to implement any of the potential sanctions.
This hesitancy has frustrated some officials inside the administration as well as congressional leaders pushing U.S. President Joe Biden to be more forceful on his human rights agenda, according to three current and former officials and two congressional aides, some of whom described sensitive internal government deliberations only on the condition of anonymity. Experts outside the government argue that the Biden administration is undercutting its own foreign-policy agenda on engagement with Africa by constantly threatening to sanction human rights violators and then not following through on those threats.
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