Journalist
Park Sae-jin박세진
swatchsjp@ajupress.com
Assistant EditorForeign embassies in Seoul & Geopolitics, Diplomacy, Policy
Experienced journalist and editor at AJU PRESS specializing in multilingual news. I cover international diplomacy, geolpolitics, and policy, consistently delivering highly accurate, compelling reporting for a worldwide audience.
"Reporting the facts. Shaping the narrative. Every second counts."
Latest by Park Sae-jin
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Kookmin University joins World Design Capital exhibition in Frankfurt SEOUL, July 23 (AJP) - A South Korean university design team was invited to Germany this month to show its work on public transportation for people who struggle to get around, one of a set of campus research projects gathered for an exhibition tied to the world's biennial design capital program. Kookmin University's Department of Automotive and Transportation Design took part in the World Design Capital Campus Exhibition 2026 Frankfurt on July 3 at the Museum Angewandte Kunst. The event is organized by the World Design Organization (WDO), which selects a World Design Capital every two years. Frankfurt holds the title for 2026, and Busan in South Korea was chosen for 2028. The Frankfurt exhibition is built around university research rather than commercial products. It gathers next-generation design projects from campuses worldwide and pairs the displays with presentations and a lecture program. The invitation came out of a project Kookmin completed in 2025 with the Genesis Design Innovation Division at Hyundai Motor, titled "Human-Centered Public Mobility Service Design Based on Future Smart Cities." The university shared those results with Hyundai Motor's European design center, the University of Art and Design Offenbach and WDO officials, who cited the project's originality in extending the invitation. At the museum, the department showed a concept video and panels explaining the project, along with scale models and a three-dimensional terrain map of the target area. Kookmin's Noh Jae-seung, who led the research, walked through the project's aims, its development and its outcome during a Design Talk session held the day after the opening. The work centers on what transportation planners call the last mile, the short final stretch of a journey that public transit often fails to cover. For older riders, people with disabilities and residents of areas with thin transit service, that gap can decide whether a trip happens at all. Hyundai Motor's Genesis Design Innovation Division said it wanted to deliver mobility solutions that could actually be used by people who have difficulty moving around and by communities cut off from transit. "In order to create a city where anyone can move freely, we sought to improve not only mobility design but also physical and digital infrastructure, and even the invisible service experience," the division said. It described the collaboration as a valuable chance to search for answers alongside Kookmin students, and said it would continue projects aimed at free mobility for everyone, including those inconvenienced on last-mile trips. Dorothée Bolade, membership engagement manager at the WDO, said Kookmin's participation showed the value of design schools communicating and connecting across borders, together with the involvement of international educational institutions working with the organization. She said the group works so that universities worldwide can share ideas, sustain academic exchange and cooperation, and consider the future of design together. She added that she hoped such exchange would carry through to the World Design Assembly in Seoul in 2027 and to Busan as the 2028 World Design Capital. Noh called the invitation meaningful recognition of the joint work with Hyundai. He said the company's active support allowed designers and students to stay in close contact through repeated feedback and design reviews while shaping user-centered mobility scenarios for future megacities. "Since Busan has been selected as the 2028 World Design Capital, it would carry even greater meaning if we could build on this project and present a more developed outcome tailored to the regional characteristics of Busan," Noh said. The project is also documented on Open Design Lab, the platform Hyundai Motor uses to publish its future mobility design research, where the theme, process and final results are available in detail. 2026-07-23 13:48:41 -
North America trade shake-up rattles Korean firms: Survey SEOUL, July 23 (AJP) - Nearly half of the South Korean companies with operations in North America expect a coming overhaul of the region's main trade pact to disrupt their business, according to a survey released this week, after Washington declined to renew the agreement in its current form and opened a decade of uncertainty across one of South Korea's biggest export markets. The finding comes from a poll of 43 South Korean firms with a presence in the United States, Mexico or Canada, conducted in early June by the Korea International Trade Association (KITA). Those three countries took in $145 billion of South Korean exports last year, more than a fifth of the national total and up from $81 billion a decade earlier, a rise of 79 percent. South Korean direct investment there grew almost as fast, reaching $28.6 billion in 2025, up 85 percent from 2016. At issue is the United States-Mexico-Canada Agreement (USMCA), the deal that governs tariff-free commerce among the three countries. On July 1, the United States told its two partners it would not extend the pact in its present shape. The decision stopped short of ending the agreement, but it set the region on course for years of annual renegotiation. USMCA took effect in 2020, replacing the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA), the 1994 accord that first bound the three economies into a single tariff-free market. Unlike NAFTA, the newer pact carries what is known as a sunset clause. It requires the partners to review the deal every six years and decide whether to keep it, and it expires in 2036 unless all three governments agree to renew. July 1 was the first of those reviews. Because Washington withheld its consent, the pact now faces a review every year until 2036, and each round is a chance to reopen its core rules. The agreement stays fully in force in the meantime, and a renewal remains possible at any time, but companies across the continent must now plan around an unsettled decade. The report, from the trade research arm of the Korea International Trade Association (KITA), set out the main points of contention. Support for keeping the deal runs strong across the three countries, but the United States has pushed for changes in several areas, a stance the report linked to the trade agenda of the second Trump administration. Mexico and Canada have leaned toward preserving the pact as it stands. The largest of the disputed issues is a tightening of rules of origin. These are the requirements that decide how much of a product must be made within North America for it to move across borders tariff-free. Washington wants a higher share of a car and its parts built in the region to qualify, along with a new standard for steel, which would have to be melted and poured in North America rather than merely finished there. Other flashpoints include tighter curbs on goods from non-market economies, a label widely understood to target China, which the United States says routes products through Mexico to reach the North American market. The talks also cover cooperation on economic security and critical minerals, stricter customs and certification checks, tougher labor and environmental enforcement, and changes to digital trade rules. South Korea is not a party to the agreement. Its exposure runs through the many Korean manufacturers that build cars, batteries and other goods in North America, or that supply parts and materials to factories there. A tighter rules-of-origin regime could force those firms to buy more of their inputs locally or lose their tariff-free treatment. In the survey, companies named the rules of origin as their leading concern. Stricter content requirements for automobiles and parts drew the most worry, cited by 27.9 percent, followed by steel and aluminum at 20.9 percent and other manufactured goods at 9.3 percent. Almost half, 48.8 percent, said the reviews would have a considerable effect on how they operate. Firms are already weighing how to respond. The most common plan, cited by 41.9 percent, was to build alternative supply chains inside North America. About a third said they would look to step in as new suppliers as the regional supply map is redrawn, and 27.9 percent were considering fresh investment in the United States. The agreement is unlikely to collapse outright, because it anchors North America's industrial supply chains, said Jeon Yoon-sik, a senior researcher at the association, but a drawn-out review makes wider uncertainty in the local business environment unavoidable. "The stronger rules on origin and supply chains raise the threat of higher costs," he said, "but the chance to move in as an alternative supplier could also grow, so companies need to examine the origin and supply chain of each product and build a response system in advance." 2026-07-23 11:00:00 -
S. Korea courts Turkmenistan with water technology SEOUL, July 23 (AJP) - South Korea spent three days this week showing Turkmenistan how it manages water, hosting a government delegation from one of the world's driest countries as Seoul works to turn its water industry into an export business across Central Asia. The visit, which ran Tuesday through Thursday in Seoul, brought officials from Turkmenistan's State Committee for Water Resources, the body overseeing the country's water policy and projects, along with its foreign ministry and the state institute handling water design and engineering. The Ministry of Foreign Affairs and the Ministry of Climate, Energy and Environment jointly hosted the program. The two sides make an unlikely but logical pair. Turkmenistan is roughly four-fifths desert, covered by the Karakum, one of the largest sand deserts on earth, and depends for most of its water on a single river, the Amu Darya, shared with its neighbors. The Soviet-era Karakum Canal, among the longest irrigation canals in the world, carries that water more than 1,300 kilometers across the country, and much of it is lost to seepage and evaporation along the way. Climate change is tightening the squeeze. For a government in that position, technology that tracks canals, cuts losses and treats water is not an abstraction. South Korea, for its part, has spent two decades building exactly that toolkit. K-water, the state water corporation, runs the national water system through a centralized digital operations center, and the country has pushed into AI-assisted purification, smart metering and remote monitoring. The delegation saw the showcase items: K-water's integrated operations center, the AI water purification plant in Hwaseong, south of Seoul, and the Gyeongin Ara Waterway connecting the Han River to the sea. The visitors also toured Korean companies specializing in canal monitoring and water treatment to examine how the technologies work in the field and discuss possible cooperation. The trip follows the first Korea-Turkmenistan water industry mission, a public-private delegation the government sent last year, its first of the kind. That visit confirmed there was room to work together, the ministries said, and this week's program was designed to make the cooperation concrete. Seoul is thinking beyond one country. The Turkmen visit ran alongside a smart water management training program for officials from all five Central Asian states, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan, Turkmenistan and Uzbekistan, a region where water is both scarce and a chronic source of tension between upstream and downstream neighbors. The week included a multilateral meeting of the five governments on water industry cooperation, a seminar where each country shared its water policies and discussed sustainable management and climate response, and a business roundtable pairing Korean water companies with Central Asian government agencies. The commercial intent is explicit. Kim Ho-eun, director general for water use policy at the climate ministry, said cooperation built up with Central Asian countries is now producing visible results, including supplies of Korean equipment and construction of facilities. "We will continue to lead the way in supporting our water companies' expansion overseas," Kim said. The diplomatic runway extends to September, when South Korea plans to hold a summit with the five Central Asian states. Opening the multilateral meeting, Kyun Jong-ho, the foreign ministry's ambassador for climate change, said cooperation on sharing water policy and management experience matters more than ever, and expressed hope the discussions would carry into deeper cooperation at the summit. The two ministries said they expect the week's program to deepen water cooperation with Turkmenistan and widen policy networks across Central Asia, and that they will keep supporting Korean water companies abroad while developing practical joint projects. 2026-07-23 10:38:01 -
Seoul, Washington, Tokyo tighten diplomatic tempo SEOUL, July 23 (AJP) - The foreign ministers of South Korea, the United States and Japan met Wednesday for the second time in just over two weeks, a pace the three governments framed as the point itself, a show of alignment staged in front of Southeast Asia's assembled diplomats in Manila. Foreign Minister Cho Hyun sat down with US Secretary of State Marco Rubio and Japanese Foreign Minister Motegi Toshimitsu on the margins of the ASEAN-related foreign ministers' meetings, the annual cluster of talks that draws the region's major powers to one venue. The three discussed regional and global affairs, economic security and the Korean Peninsula, the Ministry of Foreign Affairs said. The trilateral format has become the main vehicle for coordinating policy among the three allies. South Korea and Japan are each bound to the United States by mutual defense treaties. Still, the two neighbors have no such treaty with each other, and their cooperation has historically swung with the state of bilateral relations. The three-way framework, elevated to leader level at the Camp David summit in 2023, was built to keep that coordination running regardless. Cho said holding the meeting only two weeks after the first trilateral of the year, on the sidelines of the NATO summit on July 7, showed the weight all three countries place on the format. Convening again at the ASEAN meetings, where the region's main players gather, allowed the three to send a united message about strengthening cooperation, he said. Rubio and Motegi welcomed the short interval and agreed to keep tightening coordination, the ministry said. On North Korea, the three reaffirmed long-standing positions. They will hold to the principle of denuclearizing the peninsula while maintaining firm deterrence, keep their North Korea policies closely coordinated, and continue communication and cooperation aimed at preserving peace and stability through dialogue and diplomacy. The language on the wider region was more pointed, if never explicit. The ministers exchanged views on attempts to change the status quo unilaterally, and reaffirmed their commitment to maritime security and to international law as reflected in the United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea, including freedom of navigation and overflight in the Indo-Pacific, Southeast Asia included. None of that names a country. In diplomatic usage, however, those phrases are the standard vocabulary for China's assertiveness in the South and East China seas, and delivering them in Manila, in the region where those disputes play out, gives them their edge. Economic security took up a substantial share of the agenda. The term covers the newer terrain where trade and national security overlap, from who controls supplies of critical minerals to who can be cut off from advanced technology. The three ministers agreed that cooperation among trusted partners has never been more essential amid continued volatility in the global economy, and committed to deepening work on nuclear power, critical minerals and critical and emerging technologies. They also agreed to expand cooperation on protecting advanced technology, diversifying supply chains and building their resilience, and responding to economic coercion, another phrase without a named target that governments in all three capitals have used to describe Chinese trade pressure on countries that cross Beijing politically. One entry on the list was newer for this format: Arctic security, an area of growing attention as melting ice opens shipping routes and resource competition in the far north. Beyond security, the three noted that their cooperation has been widening into transnational crime response, disaster relief and humanitarian assistance, and agreed to push for concrete, visible results. The ministers agreed to activate consultations across sectors and levels on the momentum of Wednesday's meeting and to work toward outcomes that deliver benefits their citizens can feel, the ministry said. They reaffirmed their intention to meet as often as possible, including at multilateral gatherings. 2026-07-23 09:46:51 -
Seoul pitches AI partnership to ASEAN SEOUL, July 23 (AJP) - South Korea placed artificial intelligence at the center of its offer to Southeast Asia on Wednesday, unveiling a new initiative to help the region build AI ecosystems, train researchers and spread the technology safely, drawing on what Seoul calls its full-stack capability spanning chips, models and services. The pitch came as Foreign Minister Cho Hyun co-chaired the ASEAN Post-Ministerial Conference with the Republic of Korea in Manila, the 29th session of the annual talks that have brought Seoul together with the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) every year since 1997. Thailand, the current coordinator of the relationship, shared the chair, with all 11 ASEAN members and the bloc's secretariat attending. The AI program, named the Korea-ASEAN AI Companion Initiative, aims to apply the technology to social problems across the region while building a sustainable AI ecosystem, according to the Ministry of Foreign Affairs. Demand for AI cooperation runs high among ASEAN members, the ministry said, and detailed projects will follow. South Korea is one of the few countries that produces the full chain of AI inputs, from the memory chips that train models to homegrown models and the services built on them, which is the capability Seoul is now marketing to a region of 680 million people caught between American and Chinese technology offerings. The initiative leads a wider package. Cho introduced a new program to sharpen the competitiveness of Korean and ASEAN cultural and creative industries in the digital era, and two security projects breaking new ground for the relationship. The first, a cooperation project against scam-related crime, is the first police and coast guard undertaking between the two sides. It will run working group meetings, discuss operations to rescue victims, visit national anti-scam centers, work toward a shared database of scam crimes and conduct training. Scam compounds across Southeast Asia have drawn global attention for detaining trafficked workers, including South Koreans, and defrauding victims worldwide. The second project, a maritime safety academy, will train regional officers in maritime law enforcement, search and rescue, and pollution response. All of it falls under the Korea-ASEAN CSP Vision, the roadmap Seoul drew up after the two sides upgraded ties to a comprehensive strategic partnership, ASEAN's highest tier of relationship, in 2024. The vision entered full implementation this year. Its three pillars carry the initials: contributor for dreams and hope, springboard for growth and innovation, and partner for peace and stability. The numbers attached are ambitious. Seoul wants two-way people exchanges to reach 15 million and annual trade to reach $300 billion, up from about $200 billion in recent years, helped by an upgrade of the Korea-ASEAN free trade agreement now under negotiation. Cho told the meeting the vision would move in step with ASEAN Community Vision 2045, the bloc's own 20-year strategy adopted in May last year, and said South Korea and ASEAN had become indispensable partners as global supply chains reorganize and technology shifts accelerate. ASEAN members welcomed the vision and noted expanding cooperation in the economy, trade, AI, digital affairs, cybersecurity and cultural industries under the five-year action plan adopted last year, the ministry said. They also expressed hope for close cooperation with South Korea as the vision is put into practice. Cho separately explained Seoul's efforts toward a Korean Peninsula where the two Koreas coexist peacefully and grow together, and asked for ASEAN's continued attention. The members reaffirmed support for the government's peninsula policy, the ministry said, and agreed that peace and stability on the peninsula matter for the region as a whole. Cho also asked ASEAN members to support holding a special summit in South Korea in 2029, marking 40 years since the two sides established dialogue relations. 2026-07-23 09:11:48 -
Seoul denies receiving US Hormuz warship request SEOUL, July 22 (AJP) - No request has come from Washington for South Korea to send any specific military asset to the Strait of Hormuz, South Korea's presidential Blue House said Wednesday, pushing back against reports that a formal demand for a naval deployment was close. The denial is narrow, and the wording matters. The presidential office said the government has not been asked recently to dispatch a particular asset in connection with the safety of international sea lanes and freedom of navigation. It did not say that talks about a South Korean contribution have stopped. "We have continued to discuss related cooperation measures with the United States side," the office said, adding that Seoul is weighing practical ways to contribute to freedom of passage through the strait while taking into account readiness on the Korean Peninsula, domestic legal procedures and other factors. It declined to go further. Specific details of military and security communications between South Korea and the United States cannot be disclosed publicly, the office said. The strait carries about 20 percent of the world's oil and liquefied natural gas, and its effective closure since fighting between the United States and Iran began in March has driven up energy prices worldwide. South Korea, which imports almost all of its crude and buys much of it from Gulf producers, has more exposure to the waterway than most of the countries being asked to help police it. The pressure has been building since March 14, when President Donald Trump named South Korea, China, Japan, France and Britain in a post on Truth Social and demanded they send warships to secure the passage. Trump has since accused allies who declined of ingratitude. The domestic legal procedures the presidential office referred to are the central obstacle. Defense Minister Ahn Gyu-back told a parliamentary hearing in March that sending a warship or troops to the Strait of Hormuz would require approval from the National Assembly, a step that would turn a military decision into a political one. Any deployment would most likely involve the Cheonghae Unit, the antipiracy task force South Korea has maintained near the Gulf of Aden since 2009. The unit rotates a destroyer to the region roughly every six months with about 260 personnel and an attack helicopter aboard. There is precedent for expanding its remit. In January 2020, the government widened the unit's area of operations to include the Strait of Hormuz while stopping short of joining the US-led maritime coalition then operating there. Foreign Minister Cho Hyun has repeatedly declined to say in public whether Washington has made a request. Pressed at a parliamentary committee in March, he said only that responding to an ally's demand was an important question and that the government would act in accordance with the constitution and the law. Japan and Australia have both said they do not plan to send ships to escort vessels through the strait. 2026-07-22 14:29:58 -
AI to cut 256,000 jobs annually in S. Korea: Report SEOUL, July 22 (AJP) - Artificial intelligence is expected to eliminate roughly 256,000 jobs a year in South Korea within a decade, a report released by the Korea Development Institute showed Wednesday. AI will concentrate pressure on professionals, office workers and sales staff rather than on the manual work that earlier waves of automation displaced. The scale is easier to read against what the institute expects the labor market to do otherwise. In its outlook published earlier this year, the Korea Development Institute (KDI) projected that the number of employed people in South Korea would rise by about 170,000 in each of 2026 and 2027. The AI effect, as estimated, is larger than that annual gain. Nam Chang-woo, a senior research fellow at the state-funded institute, released the findings on July 22 in a report on the macroeconomic effects of AI. The estimated losses amount to 2.1 percent of the employed population as of 2024. The figure comes from a two-step calculation. The researchers first identified jobs exposed to AI automation 10 years from now, then estimated how many of those would be replaced outright, applying quasi-elasticity coefficients drawn from job losses in earlier rounds of production automation. Exposure grows sharply over the period. At present, the share of the economy where AI automation is commercially viable stands at 1.4 percent measured by jobs and 1.8 percent measured by revenue. Within 10 years, the report puts those figures at 8.1 percent and 10.5 percent. The report is not uniformly negative. KDI estimated that the spread of generative AI would raise South Korea's total factor productivity by 1.5 to 3.5 percent over the coming decade, or 0.15 to 0.35 percentage points a year. Total factor productivity measures output gains that cannot be explained by adding more workers or more capital, and economists treat it as the closest available proxy for how efficiently an economy uses what it already has. That figure reflects a multiplier effect. Productivity gains in sectors heavily exposed to AI spread through the rest of the economy by way of supplier and buyer linkages rather than staying where they originate. At the level of individual companies, the effect is larger and more immediate. Combining corporate financial statements with data on AI adoption, KDI estimated that introducing AI raised revenue per permanent employee by about 20 percent, a result the report describes as statistically significant. Wage inequality between occupations is expected to narrow slightly or hold steady as measured by the Gini coefficient. The reason is not that lower-paid workers gain. It is wage compression, with pay growth slowing in the high-wage occupations that AI reaches first. KDI recommended that the government act as a facilitator, drawing in the complementary private investment that AI requires while limiting the employment shock and distributional damage that come with it. In the short term, the report called for expanded support for job redesign and retraining in highly exposed occupations. It also urged the government to lower the entry barrier for small and midsize firms by operating public cloud services and shared GPU centers, and to build a data-sharing platform. Over the longer term, KDI proposed spreading labor-complementing AI solutions through public services and establishing sector-by-sector AI governance frameworks. "We need to run a tripartite consultative body of labor, management and government centered on highly exposed professional occupations to discuss job transitions and wage systems," Nam explained, adding that the social safety net should be strengthened, including by closing the gaps in unemployment benefits that will widen as AI increases non-standard work. 2026-07-22 14:06:58 -
KAIST germanium system switches oxygen reaction pathways SEOUL, July 22 (AJP) - A new molecular system developed in South Korea can be instructed how many electrons to hand over to oxygen, a switch that decides whether a reaction ends in water or hydrogen peroxide and that sits at the center of fuel cell performance, battery chemistry and cleaner industrial manufacturing. Until now, that kind of control has belonged almost entirely to transition metals such as iron, cobalt and nickel. Fuel cells depend on the four-electron route, which turns oxygen into water and releases the most energy. Plants producing hydrogen peroxide want the two-electron route and nothing else. Steering a reaction cleanly down one path rather than the other has been one of the standing problems in catalyst design. The Korea Advanced Institute of Science and Technology (KAIST) said Wednesday that a team led by Hwang Seung-jun, an associate professor in its Department of Chemistry, has demonstrated a single molecular system that can be switched between the two routes on demand. The work appeared online in the journal Chem on July 6. The switch runs on germanium, an element that was not supposed to be capable of this. Germanium sits in the same column of the periodic table as silicon, among what chemists call the main-group elements, the ordinary elements outside the transition metals. Transition metals dominate catalysis because their electron shells let them absorb and release several electrons at a time. Main-group elements normally manage two at most, which is why they have been treated as poor substitutes for reactions involving oxygen. Hwang's team got around that by pairing germanium with a redox-active ligand, a surrounding molecular framework that stores electrons and passes them back and forth. The ligand works as a reservoir. Instead of asking the germanium atom to supply everything on its own, the whole molecule shares the load, and four-electron chemistry becomes possible. Turning the four-electron pathway off proved to be a matter of blocking two electrons at the source. The researchers reacted the germanium compound with iodomethane, attaching a methyl group to the germanium center. That single change shut down the four-electron route and left the reaction running selectively on two electrons. The same platform, structurally modified, produced a different product. Along the way, the team managed to isolate a germanium intermediate that ordinarily forms and disappears within the reaction. The isolated species showed a rare property. A single germanium atom acted as both an electron donor and an electron acceptor, behavior chemists describe as ambiphilic, and it gave the researchers direct evidence of how the switching works rather than an inference from the final products. The compound turned out to do more than react with oxygen. At room temperature and without light, it stripped chlorine and bromine atoms from organic molecules carrying halogens on neighboring carbons, restoring the carbon-to-carbon double bond and regenerating alkenes, the feedstock chemicals behind everything from pharmaceuticals to plastics. That reaction is usually driven by heat or additional processing steps. It also did not occur in the phosphorus version of the same molecule, which has an equivalent electron count, indicating that germanium is not simply a heavier stand-in for phosphorus but has chemistry of its own. "This research shows that catalytic reactions that depended on transition metals can also be achieved with main-group elements such as germanium," Hwang said. He added that he expects the approach to be applied broadly in developing next-generation catalysts for cleaner and more efficient chemical processes, as well as in improving battery and fuel cell performance. The first authors were KAIST postdoctoral researchers Kim Sung-gyu and Oh Jin-rok, with Choi Dae-eui, a combined master's and doctoral student at Pohang University of Science and Technology, where Hwang taught until this year. The National Research Foundation of Korea funded the work through the Ministry of Science and ICT and the Ministry of Education, with additional support from the Samsung Science and Technology Foundation. (Reference Information) Journal/Source: Chem Title: Germanium ligand redox cooperativity: A key to ambiphilicity and switchable two- and four-electron transfer Link/DOI: https://doi.org/10.1016/j.chempr.2026.103127 2026-07-22 10:48:44 -
MOFA presses US on immigration harm to Koreans SEOUL, July 22 (AJP) - South Korea's Ministry of Foreign Affairs has asked the United States to ensure Korean nationals do not suffer unintended harm from American immigration enforcement, raising the issue directly with a senior State Department official in Seoul on Tuesday, ten months after a Georgia factory raid that saw more than 300 Korean workers detained and flown home. Park Jong-han, Deputy Minister for Economic Affairs at the Ministry of Foreign Affairs (MOFA), requested a meeting with Jason Evans, US Under Secretary of State for Management, according to a ministry statement released Wednesday. Park asked for American attention and support so that Korean nationals face no "unintended damage or unjust infringement of their rights" in connection with US immigration policy. The language was not chosen casually. "Unjust infringement" is the same phrase President Lee Jae Myung used in September 2025, after US Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agents raided the Hyundai-LG battery plant construction site near Savannah, Georgia, and detained roughly 475 workers, among them more than 300 Koreans, some led away in handcuffs and leg chains. It was the largest single-site workplace enforcement operation in the history of the US Department of Homeland Security, and it ended with MOFA negotiating the workers' release and a chartered Korean Air jet bringing them home. The raid turned a long-simmering visa problem into a diplomatic wound. Korean companies have committed hundreds of billions of dollars to US manufacturing, yet the engineers and technicians needed to build and launch those plants have no dedicated visa category. Many have entered on short-term business visas or visa waivers that sit uneasily with hands-on installation work, an ambiguity that ICE treated as illegality in Georgia. A bill to create an E-4 visa reserved for Korean professionals, similar to what Australians already hold, remains parked in the House Judiciary Committee. Lee pressed visiting US senators on the issue as recently as this spring. The enforcement climate has only hardened since President Donald Trump began his second term. His executive orders mandate what US Citizenship and Immigration Services describes as strict screening and vetting of foreign nationals seeking entry or immigration benefits, and arrest quotas reported to reach 3,000 a day have pushed agents toward large workplace operations of the kind that swept up the Korean workers. Evans was a fitting audience for the complaint. The undersecretary for management, a career diplomat sworn in shortly after the Georgia raid in September 2025, oversees the State Department's administrative machinery, including the consular bureau that issues visas. Park also told Evans that active people-to-people exchange between the two countries deepens mutual understanding and serves as a core driver sustaining a future-oriented alliance, according to the ministry. MOFA said the government plans to keep strengthening cooperation with Washington across various fields, including personnel exchanges, through the two countries' diplomatic channels. 2026-07-22 09:57:51 -
UNESCO adopts heritage strategy for climate-hit island states SEOUL, July 22 (AJP) - UNESCO's World Heritage Committee adopted a new strategy on Tuesday to help small island nations protect cultural and natural heritage that climate change is steadily destroying, a group of countries that hold some of the planet's most distinctive sites but barely register on the World Heritage List, South Korea's Ministry of Foreign Affairs said Wednesday. The scale of the gap is stark. The 39 small island developing states that have joined the World Heritage Convention account for one fifth of its membership, yet together they hold just 37 of the 1,248 sites on the list, about three percent, according to UNESCO's World Heritage Centre. Three of them, Nauru, Niue and Timor-Leste, have no inscribed site and no candidate list at all. Tuvalu shows what is at stake. The Pacific nation of nine coral atolls, where the highest point sits less than five meters above the waves, has watched the sea around it rise at twice the global average over the past 40 years. Half of its capital is projected to flood by 2050, and more than 5,000 residents, nearly half the population, have applied for a climate migration visa to Australia. Last year Tuvalu submitted its first-ever World Heritage bid, an unprecedented attempt to inscribe the cultural landscape of an entire nation, its meeting halls, taro pits and sacred sites, before the ocean claims them. The World Heritage Strategy for Small Island Developing States (SIDS), adopted during the committee's 48th session in Busan, is meant to close that gap. It sets out an eight-year plan to strengthen the capacity of island governments to nominate, manage and defend their heritage. The strategy answers a problem that has been raised for years. SIDS, a group of countries scattered across the Caribbean, the Pacific and the Atlantic and Indian Oceans, were recognized by the United Nations as a distinct category of developing nations in 1992. They face the sharpest edge of climate change while running some of the world's smallest governments. Niue has a population of about 1,300. Tuvalu's entire land area is 26 square kilometers. That smallness is why they have long been overlooked. Getting a site onto the World Heritage List requires years of technical work, nomination dossiers, comparative studies, management plans, that small island bureaucracies rarely have the staff or money to produce. International heritage funding and expertise have tended to flow toward larger developing countries with more sites, more institutions and more diplomatic weight, leaving island states at the back of the queue even as their heritage faces the most immediate threats. To mark the strategy's launch, South Korea's Ministry of Foreign Affairs and the UNESCO World Heritage Centre held a joint side event at the BEXCO convention center in Busan on July 21, bringing together around 10 representatives of island states, including panelists from Mauritius, the Maldives, the Cook Islands and Cuba. Participants discussed climate resilience, governance, policy development and community participation, the pillars of the strategy's implementation, along with ways to strengthen partnerships over the eight-year rollout. Lim Sang-woo, the ministry's Ambassador for Public Diplomacy, welcomed the adoption in his opening remarks. "SIDS possess outstanding cultural and natural heritage, yet they face numerous challenges, including climate change," Lim said. "I hope this event allows diverse views on protecting heritage in the SIDS region to be shared and lays the groundwork for practical cooperation." The strategy's adoption came during the first World Heritage Committee session ever hosted by South Korea, which joined the convention in 1988. Around 3,000 delegates from 196 member states are gathered in Busan from July 19 to 29 to decide new inscriptions and conservation policy. On the session's opening day, the committee adopted the Busan Declaration, a separate consensus document calling for international collaboration to become a guiding principle of heritage protection as climate change, armed conflict and rapid development strain sites worldwide. For Tuvalu, the timing is not academic. If current trends hold, projections show 95 percent of its land flooded by routine high tides by 2100. 2026-07-22 09:27:30