Profile of Suzanne Scholte

Suzanne Scholte since 1996 has served as president of the Defense Forum Foundation, a nonprofit organization seeking to improve human rights in North Korea.

She helped to hold hearings on North Korea’s political prisoner camps at the Senate Foreign Relations subcommittee on East Asian and Pacific Affairs in April 1999, and testified about them and the suffering of North Korean defectors in China at the Senate Judiciary Committee and the U.S. Commission on International Religious Freedom.

Scholte in 2003 arranged to have former North Korean Workers’ Party secretary Hwang Jang-yeop testify at the U.S. Congress. She also informed the United States and the international community of the human rights situation in North Korea on many occasions, including through the passage of the North Korea Human Rights Act in 2004 and North Korea Freedom Week in 2005. In addition to her foundation, she founded the North Korean Freedom Coalition in the United States and is vice chairwoman of the U.S. Committee for Human Rights in North Korea.

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