On Wednesday April 11th some 50 like-minded individuals gathered together in a conference room in the Atreon building in Shinchon downtown Seoul. The common thread that brought them together that evening was a shared concern for the human rights crisis in North Korea. The evening’s agenda included the screening of “North Korea VJ” and the testimony from a North Korean defector who had experienced repatriation.

This was the first event in NK Net’s North Korean Human Rights Speaker Series, which will take place every Wednesday evening from 6:30-8:30pm in Shinchon until May 16th. In the opening remarks, NK Net’s Webmaster Dan Bielefeld, briefly described the organization’s current projects and explained the impetus behind creating the lecture series. Bielefeld noted that NK Net has been active in South Korea for some time but most of their work has targeted native Koreans, which made it difficult to incorporate the foreign community in their activities. So the principle goal of the lecture series is to reach out to the foreign community in Seoul and discuss what they can do to assist in bringing and end to the human rights crisis in North Korea.