One of our speakers for the upcoming 2015 International Students For Liberty Conference on February 13th-15th will be Yeon-mi Park!

Yeon-mi Park enjoyed a rich lifestyle by North Korean standards for much of her life, but after her father was imprisoned for selling items to China, Yeonmi was forced to move out of Pyongyang. She escaped to China with her family after her father’s release, eventually making her way through Mongolia to freedom in South Korea. Yeonmi is part of a generation in North Korea that can’t remember a time when the government provided for its people. This generation has very little, if any, loyalty to the Kim regime. On the Casey Lartigue Show with Yeonmi Park, a TV podcast produced in South Korea, she said that because the North Korean people cannot get anything from the government, they must buy what they need from the markets to survive. At Summit, she will speak on this “Black Market Generation,” including their views on North Korea and the outside world, and their increasing consumption of foreign media. Now living in Seoul, Yeonmi studies criminal justice at Dongguk University. Since her freshman year, she has given speeches in both Korean and English to middle school- and high school-aged children about North Korea. Like our other speaker Joo Yang, she also participates in “Now on My Way to Meet You,” a television program that features North Korean women. After graduating, Yeonmi hopes to complete her master’s degree in International Relations in the United States with further ambitions of working with the United Nations and other organizations to spread awareness of North Korean human rights issues.

Check out the links below to learn more about Park’s activism:

Articles:

  • North Korea’s Best Hope 

Media:

  • Escaping from North Korea in Search of Freedom 
  • North Korean Defector Explains What It Was Like To Grow Up Thinking Kim Jong-il Was ‘A God’
  • North Korean Refugee Park Yeon-mi, Chinese Netizen Reactions 
  • ‘Watching Titanic made me realise something was wrong in my country,’ says North Korean defector 
  • Celebrity Defector 
  • I Am a North Korean Millennial 

Learn more about Yeon-mi Park’s activism here and be sure to register for the 2015 ISFLC by October 31st before prices go up!