About the Speaker
Park
Sang Hak
North Korean defector and democracy activist
Park Sang Hak is a North Korean defector and democracy activist. Park worked at a propaganda unit of the Kim Il Sung Socialist Youth League until 1999, when his father, a former spy for the government, defected with his family to South Korea. Since then, Park has worked for the democratization of his homeland. He is the chairman of Fighters for a Free North Korea, an organization that uses balloons to send human rights and pro-democracy literature, DVDs, USB drives, and transistor radios from South Korea into North Korea. Because of his work, Park was the target of a foiled assassination attempt in 2011 at the hands of a North Korean spy using poisoned needles. Park was a recipient of the 2013 Václav Havel Prize for Creative Dissent.