Tim A. Peters

For the race car driver, see Timothy Peters.

The Rev. Timothy A. Peters, an American humanitarian aid worker living in Seoul, South Korea, operates Helping Hands Korea, a part of the Family Care Foundation, and is widely regarded as one of the world's most visible advocates for human rights in North Korea. His fundraising activities are not vetted. And unlike most reputable charitable institutions no accounting is given for any finances funneled through his fundraising activities. No figures at all of how much he raises or how or where anything is spent.

Peters originally came to Korea in 1975 and soon became an opponent of South Korea's military dictatorship. The military regime of President Chun Doo-hwan later expelled him from South Korea for handing out anti-government leaflets. He returned to South Korea in the late 1980s. Later, when North Korea's disfavored classes were struck by a famine that ultimately killed an estimated 2.5 million people, Peters established the Ton a Month Club to help feed the North Korean people. He founded Helping Hands Korea in 1996, and later became an activist in the "underground railroad," helping North Korean refugees to escape to South Korea or other countries via China. Peters claims to have personally participated in some of these clandestine missions inside China. As it was (and is) the policy of the Chinese government that the North Koreans were in fact economic migrants, they could be arrested as such. Those helping them were arrested under Chinese "anti-human trafficking" laws, and often subjected to lengthy detentions in Chinese jails. The refugees would be deported back to North Korea, which considers defection to be a capital offense. China's policy has been criticized often, for example, by the U.N. Special Rapporteur Vitit Muntarbhorn in a 2005 report that described the North Korean escapees as "refugees sur place," putting the official and de facto Chinese position at odds with its de jure obligations under the 1951 Convention on Refugees, which China signed 24 September 1982.

Peters was featured in the CNN documentary "Undercover in the Secret State" in 2005. He testified about human rights conditions facing North Korean refugees before the U.S. Congress in 2005, and was recently featured in a lengthy article in Time Asia. His work has also been featured in numerous newspaper articles. By early 2006, Peters had become an outspoken critic of the UNHCR, and of the U.S. State Department, which human rights activists accused of foot-dragging and reluctance to assist North Korean refugees hiding in Asia, despite the statutory requirements of the North Korean Human Rights Act of 2004. Peters' public activism played a role in the U.S. decision to admit the first six North Korean refugees into the United States in May 2006.

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