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“We have to do something. We cannot keep silent.”

That’s how Rocky Kim describes the moment when he knew the North Korean regime he was living under was seriously flawed and that he was determined to bring about change.

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That set in motion a series of events that saw him go from student activist to victim of torture to escapee on the run and, finally, a refugee in Canada. Yet, now the federal government plans to deport him.

And Kim is hoping Canadians will hear his story — and those of dozens of other North Korean defectors living here — and agree that he should be allowed to stay.

“My father died from hunger,” Kim says during a meeting at his lawyer’s office in midtown Toronto. “I was studying in university. My major was physics.”

It wasn’t just his father who perished. North Korea has always suffered from food shortages, but the late 1990s saw a particularly bad famine. Kim watched as bodies piled up on the streets.