The Democratic Party Recruits Human Rights Activist Won Ok-geum from Vietnam

[Asia Economy Reporter Kang Nahum] On the 4th, the Democratic Party of Korea welcomed Won Okgeum (44), president of the Vietnamese Residents Association in Korea, as its 16th new recruit. This is the first recruitment case in the field of multicultural human rights.

The Democratic Party held a welcoming ceremony at the National Assembly on the same day to announce Won's joining the party.

Born in Long Thanh, Dong Nai Province, southern Vietnam, Won met her Korean husband, who was dispatched as an engineer while working at a Vietnamese state-owned construction company in 1996, and got married. The following year, she entered Korea and acquired Korean nationality in 1998.

In 2004, while working as an operator of an online community for Korean-Vietnamese multicultural families, she began counseling migrant women struggling with cultural differences, marking the start of her career as a migrant human rights activist.

Since then, she has served as the representative of the migrant center 'Donghaeng,' a director of the Seoul Foreign Workers Center, a member of the Human Rights and Diversity Subcommittee of the Seoul Foreign Residents Representatives Council, and an honorary mayor for foreigners in Seoul.

She has been active in protecting the rights of migrant workers and proposing migrant policies reflecting the voices of migrants on the ground to local governments. In 2017, she was recognized for these contributions and received the Presidential Citation commemorating World Migrants Day.

Won studied law at Korea National Open University to protect the legal rights of migrants and graduated from the Department of Legal Affairs at Konkuk University Graduate School of Public Administration in 2013.

At the party joining ceremony, Won stated, "I want to create a happier Korea where every Korean citizen, regardless of origin, status, or occupation, is respected and treated with dignity, and where everyone’s love makes the country better."

This content was produced with the assistance of AI translation services.