Former diplomat Tae Yongho was selected as the new head of the presidential advisory council on unification by the President Yoon Suk Yeol, the Yonhap news agency reported on Thursday.
, Tae becomes the highest-ranking defector with the new role.
also makes him designated to a vice-ministerial job in South Korea.
As the new head of the unification council, he will be advising on peaceful Korean unification.
“He is the right person to help establish a peaceful unification policy based on liberal democracy and garner support from home and abroad,” Yeoul’s office said in a statement.
Tae has advocated for a Russia-Ukraine-like prisoner swap between the North and the South saying, “our people’s lives matter.”
Who is Tae Yongho?
Born in Pyongyang in 1962, Tae was a minister of the North Korean Embassy in London.
In 2016, he and later was also elected as a lawmaker of the ruling People Power Party from the affluent district of Gangnam in Seoul. He was the first former North Korean to be directly elected to South Korea’s National Assembly, according to South Korean news paper The Korea Times.
As a lawmaker, he was also appointed as the head of the .
In his statements earlier, Tae has said he defected to South Korea because he wanted to live in a Korean democracy and didn’t want his children to have “miserable” lives in North Korea.
and accused him of a number of criminal acts, including child molestation and embezzlement of government funds.
Pyongyang also accuses Seoul of exploiting the defection of Tae for propaganda purposes to embarrass the North’s leader, .
Edited by: Farah Bahgat
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