Korean Church Coalition - July 26,2013

Hyah ha shamika Grace Meng … It's an honor to be here with all of you today, and I want to thank all the Moksa-nim and all the students and young people who took time out of their busy schedules to be here for this important event. I especially want to thank Sam Kim and … for organizing this event, and it's wonderful to see our National Assembly Woman Park Sung Jung and for former minister Kim Seok Woo here today.

You know, I’m- I’m not here just as a Congressmember, but I'm here as a mother of two young children, and I'm here as a fellow Christian. It's important to have events like this because we all need to keep focused on the plight of these children, and it's so easy to forget that with all the discussion about North Korea and nuclear weapons and non-proliferation and sanctions.

As a mom, it breaks my heart to hear that about 40,000 North Korean children under the age of five become acutely malnourished because North Korea is not able to feed itself. As you know, there are two- more than 2,000 defector orphans in China who fled with their parents and their parents are forced back to North Korea.

We must continue to work hard, and I thank you for doing that to give a voice to the voiceless because these human rights violations are still happening and we need to take action. In addition to my own resolution HRES 200 that reaffirms the strong United States relationship with South Korea, I'm proud to be a co-sponsor of HR 1771 North Korea sanctions that include specific sanctions on human rights violations, and I want to thank Congressman Royce and Angel and Congressman Mike Kelly for working so hard on these issues.

But thank you, you know, for being here continued to fight the good fight and as a new freshman Congress member from Queens New York, know that I am on your side thank you.

We would like to present you … with an “on behalf of the voiceless” t-shirt. We thank you for coming out and for speaking out on behalf of the unfortunate North Korean refugees, orphans and the people in North Korea. Thank you.