Student leaders of Penn for Liberty in North Korea spoke to The Daily Pennsylvanian about the group’s plans for the upcoming semester.
Penn4LiNK serves as the Penn chapter of the international, non-profit organization, Liberty in North Korea, dedicated to raising awareness and advocating for human rights issues in North Korea. LiNK has over 100 teams in 16 countries.
College senior and Penn4LiNK President Sophia Lee described the chapter’s plans to host an event with resettled North Korean speakers on Monday, Oct. 13.
“The event will be part of LiNK’s Advocacy Fellows program — a three-month program where North Korean refugees travel across the U.S. sharing their stories and engaging in public speaking and advocacy opportunities,” Lee said.
In addition, Lee expressed the organization’s desire to continue activities begun over the past years. According to College senior and former Penn4LiNK President Jamie Lim, these have “focused on fundraising and raising awareness of these issues in Penn and the surrounding Korean community.”
A group of Penn4LiNK members have been attending events hosted by other organizations related to North Korean human rights issues such as the Philadelphia Chapter of the Peaceful Unification Advisory Council, a constitutional body in South Korea that advises the nation’s president on policies for the peaceful unification of the two Koreas.
“We go to [PUAC] events regularly because it’s a very big government organization where we can really meet important people who are into Korean unification or fundraising,” Lim said. “We also participated in the [United Nations] General Assembly to meet the Korean diplomats.”
Additionally, Penn4LiNK held a watch party for “Beyond Utopia,” a documentary released in 2023 that combines interviews with secretly shot footage, showing the difficulties that North Korean defectors face.
The group has also led fundraising initiatives, like selling the Korean food kimbap. Lim says that when people want to buy their kimbap, the group tells them “about the current reality of North Korean refugees and the conditions in North Korea.”
As an international organization, LiNK has raised over $1 million in support of North Korean defectors and contributed to the rescues of over 300 refugees. LiNK’s Bao Sei Scholarship also offers North Korean escapees the chance to pursue post-secondary education in the United States.
In an interview with the DP, one North Korean defector, Sunghyuk An, spoke on the impact that organizations like LiNK have had on his life. After escaping North Korea in 2011, An and his family struggled financially in South Korea, having come across the border with virtually no possessions.
Despite that, An — now pursuing his second master’s degree in international relations at the University of Chicago — has had the opportunity of attending Yonsei University and Syracuse University as a result of LiNK’s Bao Sei Scholarship and a Fulbright Scholarship.
Penn4LiNK’s members remain committed to their mission of advocating for issues surrounding North Korea through education and fundraising.
“It is critical to really raise awareness within the Korean community in the U.S. because we are all from one root,” Lim said. “As a people with the same ethnicity, it is important to have that collectivism.”
