Robert Park to release album

Robert Park, a high-profile activist and minister who was tortured by the North Korean regime in 2009-2010 will be releasing his first full-length album before the end of this year. Park made world headlines when he crossed illegally into North Korea in 2009 as a protest calling for an immediate end to well-documented mass atrocities taking place in the country’s prison camps; where up to 250,000 innocents, one-third of whom are children, are currently being forced to do slave labour on starvation rations and political prisoners are systematically tortured, raped and executed. In some twenty articles published over the last year in major newspapers, business and academic journals around the world, he has successfully elevated the conscience of the international community to recognize what is taking place there as genocide as defined by Raphael Lemkin’s 1948 UN Genocide Convention.

Caption: Robert Park

Over the last few years, Robert has composed several songs (over three albums worth) of extraordinary depth and universal value, in part to cope with the overwhelming trauma of what he has suffered. His songs have been favourably compared to the work of acclaimed singer-songwriters such as Nick Drake, Jeff Buckley, and Tracy Chapman; but they spring from his own unique suffering and life experience and are of the highest poetic, artistic, and musical integrity. 14 remarkable demo recordings can be sampled at: www.robertparkofficial.com. 100% of his personal proceeds from this album will be donated to charity: one-third to North Koreans in crisis, one-third to humanitarian ministries led by Africans serving in Africa, and one-third to other charities serving people in need around the world.

Park is an ordained minister who for over a decade has been committed to serving those who have been victims of injustice through direct action, and has been inspired by the example and selflessness of several great women and men in history such as Anna Akhmatova, Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Jan Karski, Martin Luther King, Patrice Lumumba, Oscar Romero, Hannah Senesh, Desmond Tutu, Raoul Wallenberg, and Simone Weil.