The United States plans to release a second blacklist in December of North Korean officials and entities to be sanctioned for their involvement in human rights violations, a senior State Department official said Tuesday.

Scott Busby, deputy assistant secretary for democracy, human rights and labor, made the remark during a seminar, saying increasing accountability of North Korean officials is one of the three US strategies to improve the human rights situation in the North.

In July, the US imposed sanctions on North Korean leader Kim Jong-un and other senior officials for human rights abuses. It was the first time the US has imposed direct sanctions on the North's leader and the designation also marked the first US sanctions on Pyongyang over its human rights abuses.

"Under the law that calls for us to name individuals responsible for human rights abuses and sanction them, we are supposed to continue identifying new individuals every six months.

So we're in the throes of now putting together a second list of individuals and entities, which we hope to release in December," Busby said during the seminar organized by the Institute for Corean-American Studies (ICAS).

Busby said that July's sanctions on the North's leader mark the first time the US specifically sanction North Korean officials for being responsible for or associated with human rights abuses, adding that the move "sends a strong signal condemning these abuses and our determination to see them stopped."

"By taking these sanctions, we seek to warn the North Korean leadership and officials, particularly mid-level officials at prison camps, interrogators, defector chasers that their actions are not hidden," Busby said.

"Our message has consistently sought to remind them that the world is watching and someday they will be held to account for what they've done," he said. "In so doing, we hope to deter some of them from engaging in such abuses and encourage them to adopt practices that are more in line with international human rights standards."

As part of efforts to promote the international awareness of the North's human rights problem, the US is also working closely with other governments to help a strong resolution pass through the Third Committee and the UN General Assembly, he said.

Busby also said the US is gearing up efforts to sanction foreign companies exploiting North Korean laborers.

"In the executive order the president issued last March as well as in the UN Security Council resolution, it provides authority, it calls on us to sanction companies that are exploiting North Korean laborers overseas because that is another source of hard currency for the regime," he said.

"So we are beginning the effort to identify those companies and sanction them," he said.

He said, however, that the US is exercising caution to make sure that such efforts won't affect companies that treat North Korean workers well and help expose them to the outside world.

"So in countries where we think it might be a net positive in terms of enlightening them and helping to increase the flow of information about the outside world in North Korea, those might not be the companies that we focus on, but clearly those companies who are exploiting laborers, they are now on our target list," he said.

The US is looking at companies in China and Russia that use North Korean labor, but has not yet reached the point where "we can call them out publicly."

North Korea has long been labeled as one of the worst human rights violators. The communist regime does not tolerate dissent, holds hundreds of thousands of people in political prison camps and keeps tight control over outside information.

But the North has bristled at such criticism, calling it a US-led attempt to topple its regime.  (Yonhap)