A prominent North Korean defector was tapped to head the presidential advisory council on unification and an engineering professor was named the new science minister, the presidential office said Thursday.

President Yoon Suk Yeol has tapped Tae Yong-ho, a former North Korean deputy ambassador to Britain, as the secretary general for the Peaceful Unification Advisory Council, chief of staff Chung Jin-suk said during a press briefing.

Yoon also named Yoo Sang-im, a materials engineering professor, to lead the Ministry of Science and ICT.

Tae, born in Pyongyang in 1962, is the first North Korean defector to serve in the deputy ministerial post since the council was established in 1980.

Tae fled to South Korea in 2016 in a high-profile defection by a ranking North Korean diplomat. He was elected in the affluent district of Gangnam in Seoul in 2020 as a lawmaker of the ruling People Power Party but failed to secure a second term in the April parliamentary elections.

“He is the right person to help establish a
peaceful unification policy based on liberal democracy and garner support from home and abroad,” the presidential office said in a press release, citing his vivid experiences” living in North Korea and his expertise as a former member of the Foreign Affairs and Unification Committee in the National Assembly.

Also Thursday, Yoon named Kim Sung-sup, presidential secretary for SMEs and startups, as the ministry’s new vice minister, and Nam Hyung-Ki, an official of the Office for Government Policy Coordination (OPC) as the second deputy chief of the OPC under the prime minister.

Source: Yonhap News Agency