Three political migrants share their journeys
Jihyun Park
Jihyun Park was born in North Korea and escaped the regime twice before finally settling in the UK in 2008. Since then, she has dedicated her life to raising awareness about the human rights abuses faced by North Korean women and advocating for change. Her journey is captured in her book, The Hard Road Out, and through public speaking, including a TEDx talk. She has testified in the UK House of Commons and appeared on major media outlets such as BBC, Sky News, ITV, and CNN.
“Where do you think you’re going?”
This question has haunted me like a shadow—at border crossings, in dark prison cells, in whispered threats from guards, in the screams of interrogators.
I was born in North Korea, where freedom of movement is not a right but a crime. Where even speech and thought are controlled, and freedom exists only in secret prayers.
The regime claimed a socialist paradise, but the paradise was an illusion. There was no equality. There was suspicion instead of solidarity. Children starved while leaders lived in luxury. Beneath the name of socialism lay ruthless dictatorship. From childhood, I learned to survive through obedience, but my soul longed for something greater.
When I first escaped to China, I believed I had found freedom. But there, I was treated as a commodity rather than a human being. Human trafficking strips people of their dignity, and I was bought and sold like an animal.
China’s government hunts down North Korean defectors through so-called “hunting campaigns” and forcibly repatriates them. International refugee protections are ignored. I was captured, imprisoned, and sent back to North Korea.
Political prison camps are not a thing of the past. They still exist in places like North Korea and China. Pregnant women are forced to have abortions; newborns are killed before their mother’s eyes. The media hides these atrocities, portraying dictators as legitimate leaders and masking their evil deeds.
After my first escape, recapture, and repatriation, I needed to return to China. My son was alone on the other side of a dangerous border. I could not rest, knowing he was trapped in the same hell. So I risked my life again to escape.
My second escape was not only for the sake of my own freedom but a fight to protect my son. A mother’s love carried me over mountains, rivers, and shadows. I knew the risks, but losing my son was a fate worse than death.
My story is not mine alone. It is in the heart of every mother who cannot close her eyes properly because her children are lost. Wherever war, dictatorship, and poverty tear apart families, countless mothers share this pain and hope.
Living in the UK, I have seen another reality. Many who live in free countries believe their freedom is eternal and deserved. But nothing in this world is free. Freedom is a right won through sacrifice and blood.
Many Westerners lack understanding of the ideologies behind their freedoms. This ignorance allows prejudice against immigrants and refugees to persist. Refugees are often treated not as people with basic rights under international law, but as political tools in divisive narratives.
The media highlights the cruel smiles of brutal dictators, yet many fail to grasp what Hannah Arendt called the “banality of evil.” They do not fully feel how ordinary people commit extraordinary cruelty by obeying orders or turning a blind eye. This ignorance saddens me.
Many here do not know how to fight because they do not understand how oppression subtly operates. Through my story and truth, I hope to awaken hearts and minds.
I want to leave you with a teaching from Epictetus:
“Everything has two handles: one by which it may be borne, another by which it cannot.”
Through my journey across borders, I have learned to hold tightly to the handle I can bear—my will, my love, and my courage. The other handle—oppression, hatred, fate—is beyond my control and must be released. But by never letting go of what I can bear, I choose freedom every day.
This story is not mine alone. It is a lesson for all who seek liberty: focus on what you can bear, and never let go.
Katsiaryna Shulhan
Katsiaryna Shulhan is a Belarusian student and writer living in exile after the protests against the falsified 2020 elections. She is the founder of the Belarusian youth organization Belarusian Students for Freedom (BSF).
Have you ever asked yourself how much a visa to your country costs? Or what road a person must take if they simply decide to move and work? Have you ever thought about what migration really is? Not about the big numbers showing how the economy grew because workers arrived. Not about the complaints that “illegal migrants” come to receive benefits and do not integrate. But about an ordinary person who just decided to move.
I never thought about it. Honestly, I would not have thought about it, if I had not faced it myself.
I never planned to leave. As a child, I imagined my whole future in my own country. Even when I saw foreigners around me, I believed their lives were the same as mine. I never knew they might have fought for decades for the right to live normally. That they might work, build families, feel part of the nation—and still remain “second-class people.”
Later I understood that there are different kinds of migrants. Some move for work, some for studies, some for social benefits. But there are also political migrants. I am one of them. Did I ever plan to leave? No. But one day I had to take a bus with no return ticket. The country might seem friendly at first, but sooner or later you face the demand: legalize yourself. After half a year I discovered that the procedure for international protection is confusing and hard.
To get a residence permit you must study (but who accepts you in the middle of the year?) or find a job within a month. But what if you are an expelled student, escaping political persecution, with your whole life destroyed, with no diploma and no clear plan? Legalization becomes almost impossible.
Another way is marriage. And even though I do not agree with fake marriages, I understand why people choose this path when bureaucracy blocks every road.
In some countries, corruption lets you “solve the problem” with money. In others, there are strict rules that take years. Paradoxically, sometimes it is easier and faster to get a visa to the EU than a residence permit in a country with weak and broken laws.
Many people imagine the EU as a paradise with high benefits. In reality, for me it was simply the chance to get a visa quickly, without endless papers or huge costs. At the border, officers shouted at us, saying our visas were illegal (it was during the COVID-19 pandemic when there were significant restrictions to asylum processing). We provided all the prepared papers, but we did not know the language, and we could not answer their questions. Welcome to Europe.
Then came confusion. How does everything work here? You are lucky if you have friends who can explain and give you a place to stay for some time. After that, you must start from zero. We applied to two universities to catch up. Now I’m studying both, to make up for the lost years and without feeling that my country stole my education.
I was a student for seven years overall, and feel that my adult life is only just beginning. Meanwhile, my classmates who stayed at home have almost five years of work experience already. I am thankful to the universities that accepted repressed students, but nobody can return those years.
And what about the passport? For most people it is just a small document that needs changing every few years. For me, it is a tool of repression. When it expires, my country says: “You can get a new one only if you return.” But “return” means prison for eight years “for participating in riots.” On the day I left, I did not think about my passport. I hoped to come back in a few months. But months turned into years. And now I am a person without a passport, for whom the world is closed.
International protection means constant struggle with papers. A residence permit for two years, a travel document for one. Each year you must collect everything again.
But the hardest thing is not the bureaucracy. It’s the feeling that your own country does not want you. That much of the world is closed to you. And even though you are on the side of “good,” with international protection, for many countries you are still dangerous. You are unwanted. You feel like a criminal. At the border they take your photo, your fingerprints, your video. For others it takes a minute—show the passport and walk away. For you, it is humiliation. Because you were born in the wrong place. And every day you must prove that you have the right to live, to work, to be human.
This is what the life of a political migrant feels like.
Kateryna Babenko
Kateryna Babenko is a Ukrainian IT practitioner exploring digital transformation in customer service and internal operations. Known for her commentary on industry trends, she combines technical expertise with a long-standing interest in libertarian thought. She lives in Lviv, Ukraine.
On February 24, 2022, I woke up to explosions.
I was in Zaporizhzhia, my hometown in southeastern Ukraine, visiting family. It was supposed to be a quick trip. Some medical things, a few hugs, maybe a train ride back to Odessa where I lived my quiet, good life near the sea.
For two years, I had finally been living. A post-depression calm. My own apartment. A job I loved in the IT sector. Plans – real, adult plans. I didn’t believe life could be that peaceful.
And then the war came.
The thing about freedom is that we assume it’s part of the default package. A passive right. A guarantee. But on that morning, freedom vanished—like bottles of water in the stores. Everyone wanted it. Everyone had always taken it for granted.
I bought a train ticket to Lviv by refreshing the website obsessively. No seats. Then one. Gone. Then again. I got it. The train was late. Two, maybe four hours. Time was irrelevant. In the window, I saw lines of cars, lines at grocery stores—people just trying to buy water. I found mine at an alcohol shop. That’s the kind of absurd logic that replaces normality during war: you hydrate from a liquor store, and you count your blessings.
The train ride from Lviv to Przemyśl, Poland should take four hours. It took thirteen. I stood the entire time. My legs swelled. The Polish border guards knew this. They didn’t ask questions that shouldn’t be asked. They gave us water. They moved quickly. They treated us like humans. On the railway station platform, there was food, aid, kindness. I wasn’t a refugee—I was a forced migrant being held with care. That distinction matters.
But even in that moment—surrounded by kindness, given water, allowed to pass—I couldn’t help but realize that freedom had never been “granted.” It had been interrupted. I did not become free when I crossed the border. I simply moved from a place where freedom was violated to one where it was (momentarily) respected.
That’s what many people misunderstand. Freedom isn’t a gift from governments. It’s not earned by paperwork. It’s the default. A natural condition. The absence of force.
I saw this more clearly than ever in that first breath of air after the border. I didn’t feel liberated, I just felt uncoerced. Freedom begins where force ends. Not where you’re fed, clothed, or approved—but where your life is finally yours again. And that distinction is everything.
What happened in Ukraine wasn’t just an invasion. It was the most grotesque form of coercion: mass-scale, calculated, ideologically hollow. And what saved us—those who crossed borders, who stayed, who fought—was not just resilience or nationalism. It was the insistence on staying reasoning beings in a world trying to reduce us to reaction. That’s where I locate freedom now: not in governments or paperwork, but in the clarity of my own thoughts. In my refusal to collapse into helplessness.
I didn’t want shelter. I wanted my agency back.
But no amount of care erases the fact that I lost my home because of Putin—and those who support him. We like to isolate blame. It’s easier. But this war was not started by one man. It’s powered by networks of allegiance, by despotic sympathizers, by global permissions wrapped in silence. A system that tolerates force—political, military, social—is a system where freedom doesn’t exist. You can’t sanction silence. You can only name it.
Even now, years later, I live in what I jokingly—but precisely—call a bivouac state. A life borrowed, patched together. I am nowhere. I am everywhere. I’m not ungrateful. I’m just not whole.
Eventually, I returned to Ukraine—Lviv, this time. A city with deep roots in national identity. It’s strange, but I’m learning about Ukraine now in ways I never did before. In Zaporizhzhia, Russian expansionism shaped the atmosphere until 2014. Culture felt like something ambient, unspoken. Here in Lviv, it’s active. Assertive. Proud.
I want to export that culture – not as a sob story, not as victimhood, but as art. As complexity. As beauty.
Because when the world looks at us, I don’t want their first association to be destruction. I want them to see what we’ve created in the spaces between trauma. The humour. The music. The absolute refusal to become just a data point on someone’s dashboard.
I didn’t cross that border to be saved. I crossed it to stay human.
And I still am.
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