Rob Portman: “I am also rising today to ask unanimous consent from my colleagues to pass other legislation, S. 2129, a bipartisan bill…”

“I am also rising today to ask unanimous consent from my colleagues to pass other legislation, S. 2129, a bipartisan bill that I have coauthored with my colleague from Ohio, Senator Sherrod Brown. It honors a young man named Otto Warmbier, and it counters North Korea's censorship and surveillance state. Otto Warmbier was a native of my hometown in Cincinnati, OH, and his wonderful family are dear friends. He was a young man of great spirit, great intellect, and great promise. He was a student, a star at the University of Virginia. In 2015, he went to North Korea with a tour group. It was a cultural visit with people from the United States, from Europe, looking to see what North Korea was like. They were there for a very brief period of time, but at the end of that brief visit, as he was waiting in line at the airport to leave with fellow members of the tour, North Korean security officials grabbed him and pulled him out of line. He was detained, and then eventually he was sentenced for 15 years on trumped-up charges relating to whether or not he tried to take down a poster that was a political poster--15 years. Otto Warmbier, again, a young man of great promise, was unjustly convicted and imprisoned. And during a 17-month period of imprisonment, captivity, he was badly mistreated by the North Koreans, to the point that when he was returned to the United States in 2017, he came back in a comatose state from which he never recovered.…”