South Korea

Honesty in the South Korean governance structure is essential in a time when tensions on the peninsula threaten the security of the entire region. Bong-Scuk Sohn is the first woman to serve as commissioner of the National Election Commission, a nine-member supreme constitutional body responsible for election management. While co-chair of the Korean Women’s NGO Committee, she represented South Korea’s NGOs at the Fourth UN World Conference on Women. Founder, former director, and president of the board of directors of the Center for Korean Women and Politics, she is founder and co-president of Korean Women for Legislature, a nationwide women’s civic watchdog. She has been a leader of several civic organizations in South Korea, including the Citizen’s Coalition for Political Reform and the Korean Coalition for Citizen Movement, and was chief executive director of the Citizen Coalition for Fair Election Movement. Dr. Sohn is committed to political approaches in stabilizing the peninsula and has been outspoken about the power of Japan to be a force for reconciliation or division in the region. She has authored and coauthored over a dozen books and numerous articles on women and politics on the Korean peninsula, including A Comparative Study on the Political Participation of South and North Korean Women; A Study of Congresswomen in Korea; and Local Assembly Elections and Women Candidates. She holds a visiting professorship at the Graduate School of NGO Studies, and she is director of the Best Woman Academy at Kyung Hee University. A former Parvin fellow at the Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs at Princeton University, Dr. Sohn was a visiting scholar at the Center for American Women and Politics at Rutgers University’s Eagleton Institute and a visiting research fellow at the Center for Cross-Cultural Research on Women at Oxford University’s Queen Elizabeth House and the Institute of Southeast Asian Studies in Singapore. She holds a master’s degree in politics from the University of Hawaii and a master’s degree and doctorate in the same subject from Ewha Women’s University.

Dr. Sohn’s peace-building activities include:

• being named commissioner of the UN’s Independent Electoral Commission for the East Timor Popular Consultation by Secretary-General Kofi Annan in 1999;
• urging the Korean government to send civil society experts rather than troops to Iraq, by using her role as a leading voice within a coalition of 50 NGOs;
• chairing the UN Independent Electoral Commission for the Constituent Election in East Timor, with the resulting Constituent Assembly responsible for drafting the constitution;
• acting as an international observer in the 2000 Mexican general election;
• consulting for and participating in workshops, seminars, and training sessions on women in politics, gender issues in policymaking, and political leadership training;
• authoring Birth of East Timor: Eyewitness Account of a Human Drama, testimony to the hardship the people of East Timor faced in their bid for independence; and
• lobbying East Timor officials to establish a Ministry of Peace rather than Defense.

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