04:56

“Don’t come back,” said Hyeonseo Lee’s mother in their first phone call after the young defector had made a daring escape from North Korea.

Hyeonseo, 17 at the time, was trying to adjust to her new life in China. It would take 12 years but she did eventually return: to rescue her mother and brother and take them to South Korea.

The night I helped my mother escape North Korea Read more

The indoctrinated child who once thought North Korea “was the best place on the planet” has since become an outspoken critic of the regime, calling out the country’s human rights atrocities.



Nuclear tests and re-defectors

And the regime she tirelessly campaigns against has had a busy start to the year. In early January Pyongyang captured the world’s attention by setting off a fourth nuclear test two days before leader Kim Jong-un’s 33rd birthday.

The bomb “should not cause the world to forget that the Kim family’s hereditary dictatorship is built on the systematic brutalisation and abuse of the North Korean people”, warned Human Rights Watch at the time.

In reaction to the test South Korea began resuming propaganda broadcasts near the border – the same broadcasts which caused Kim to declare the North “on the brink of war” back in August last year.

A few weeks later state media released a video of a defector who had come home. Son Ok-soon was shown ripping up her memoir which was critical of the regime, declaring that her fatherland had changed remarkably over the past 10 years.



Any questions?

So how does it feel to be a defector watching these events unfold back home? Hyeonseo will join us for a live Q&A Wednesday 3 February between 1-2pm GMT to answer as many of your questions as she can. Add them to the comments below, tweet them at @GuardianNK or email maeve.shearlaw@theguardian.com.