Timothy Cho, co-Secretariat of the All-Party Parliamentary Group on North Korea shares his insight at The City Law School.
By Dr Shamim Quadir (Senior Communications Officer), Published
On Wednesday 23 October, The City Law School welcomed Timothy Cho, co-Secretariat of the All-Party Parliamentary Group on North Korea, to deliver his lecture on human rights, political and religious persecution in North Korea and other nations.
Timothy is a two-time North Korean escapee who has endured imprisonment four times in China and North Korea.
After his parents fled North Korea, he became a homeless member of the ‘enemy class’, a group comprised of families of regime defectors deprived of opportunities.
Timothy previously served as an aid to Fiona Bruce MP for Congleton in 2018-19 and serves as an Open Doors spokesperson for Korea and a CREDO Ambassador for persecuted people worldwide.
He regularly speaks at conferences in the UK and internationally, including the 49th, 52nd, and 55th United Nations Human Rights Council sessions on North Korea.
During his lecture, Timothy reflected on his personal journey to escape North Korea, providing insight into aspects of his earlier life, which included a complete lack of awareness of the world outside the country, and describing the systems of oppression which ensured he would remain prisoner in the state and in his own mind.
He shared:
“Within the country, complete information blockage means there are no conversations you can have freely in North Korea. We expect that our 2.5 million phones will be processed by the state, and implanted with a phone-tapping technology. Imagine, of 35 million people, only 2.5 million people have mobile phones, which constitute the ruling classes. And those phones don’t have internet, you can’t have anything connected to it from the outside.”
“And within the provinces and towns inside the country, you have to get travel documents to move around. So North Korea has its own permanent lockdown, as you and I both experienced temporarily in the UK and western countries during the Covid pandemic.
“If you live outside it, and you want to go to Pyongyang you have to apply for a visa. It takes six months, but sometimes they don’t even grant that to you.
“And when you have a TV, you buy it from somewhere, but the government comes to your house, and removes all the channels, but one: so they expect you to watch the Kim family’s programmes 24-7”.
Talking about the levels of collective punishment waged on families by the state in North Korea he shared:
‘Two years ago there was a news story of two year old boy was sent to a prison camp with his parents who were given five years prison for the sharing of religious materials.