Candlelight Prayer Vigil Calls for North Korean Human Rights, Religious Freedom
Some 20,000 people gathered in Seoul on Saturday to pray for the improvement of human rights in North Korea.
“We are here for the love of God, for the cooperation and dialogue between the North and the South, for peace, for the human rights of our North Korean brethren, and for national unity,” said the Rev. Choi Sung Kyoo, General Secretary of the Christian Council of Korea (CCK), during the opening of the massive candlelight prayer rally.
“Lifting our candles, we will shout to the world to take interest in the freedom and human rights of our brothers in North Korea,” he said as he urged the audience to “pray for the right to life of our North Korean brethren.”
The prayer rally, organized by the CCK and hundreds of South Korean churches, was part of a larger Seoul Summit effort to raise international awareness of the ongoing atrocities in the communist North and to urge Seoul to take a firmer stance on Pyongyang.
Jay Lefkowitz, the U.S. envoy for human rights, addressed the prayer rally and service with an assertion that “there is a time for everything, and now is the time for the security of North Korean human rights and the attainment of religious freedom,” according to Christian Today Korea.
In his introduction, Lefkowitz likened the plight of the North Koreans to that of the Israelites under Pharaoh’s rule, and said that just as Moses asserted his people’s right to hold service, “we must light the fire for the religious freedom and human rights of North Koreans.”
