Treasury Declined Request to Sanction Hikvision, Lawmakers Say

The Treasury Department declined a request by the two leaders of the House Foreign Affairs Committee to impose Global Magnitsky sanctions against leading Chinese surveillance company Hikvision for human rights violations, Chair Rep. Michael McCaul, R-Texas, said this week.

McCaul and Rep. Gregory Meeks of New York, the committee’s top Democrat, asked Treasury in March to add Hikvision to the agency’s Specially Designated Nationals List. The lawmakers noted that Hikvision is on the Commerce Department’s Entity List for alleged human rights abuses against minority groups in Xinjiang (see 2303070038).

Treasury has since “decided not to sanction the company,” McCaul said during a committee hearing this week. “That is the weakness of the sanctions model, is that the Treasury Department" can choose not to impose sanctions.

Rep. Andy Barr, R-Ky., called the letter “troubling.” He pointed to a bill he introduced, the Chinese Military and Surveillance Company Sanctions Act (see 2309200052), which would require the administration to make annual determinations on whether sanctions should be applied to companies on the Entity List and other denied party lists.

The bill “would require Treasury to not just send a perfunctory letter back to the chairman,” Barr said. It would require the agency to “inform the chairman, this committee, the Financial Services Committee, the Senate counterparts, on an annual basis, why the Treasury Department is not imposing full blocking sanctions on Hikvision.”

A Treasury spokesperson didn’t respond to a request for comment.