South Korean presidential candidate to speak today in Rockefeller

At a time when the tensions on the Korean peninsula are at their highest in decades, Kwon Young-Ghil, the presidential candidate of the Democratic Labor Party (DLP) in last December's South Korea elections, will speak at Cornell on Korean democracy and the current crisis in Korea.

His talk will be tonight, Jan. 23, at 4:30 p.m. in 230 Rockefeller Hall on campus.

Born in 1941, Kwon worked as a journalist for many years for the Seoul Sinmun in Paris. From 1988 to 1994, he was president of the National Union of Media Workers. He led the merger of industrial and office workers' unions in 1990 into an umbrella labor organization, the Korean Confederation of Trade Unions, a major event in Korean labor history, and he became the first president of the KCTU in November 1995. Kwon grabbed the media spotlight in 1996 when he helped organize a general strike. He went on to organize the National Alliance for Democracy and the Reunification of Korea, an umbrella liberal-leaning party, and he ran for president of South Korea in 1997 under the banner of the People's Victory 21 party, getting 1.2 percent of the vote.

The DLP is an alliance of organizations representing labor, farmers and progressive intellectuals, and Kwon has served as the party president since its founding in 2000. He received 3.9 percent of the total votes cast in the 2002 presidential election.

Kwon's visit to Cornell is sponsored by the Cornell East Asia Program, in collaboration with the Peace Studies Program, the Department of Government and the School of Industrial and Labor Relations.