LONDON • Ms Ji Hyun Park shares the civic concerns of any other would-be town councillor in Britain, from local education to potholes in the roads. But she is unique in one regard: No other candidate has fled North Korea.

Ms Park is believed to be the first defector from the oppressive state to have run for office in any country, other than South Korea, after fleeing human trafficking in China and the brutal privations of a North Korean prison camp.

Thirteen years after finding refuge in Britain, the 52-year-old is standing for Prime Minister Boris Johnson's Conservative Party in council elections coming up in May, pledging to speak for other "voiceless people". She said: "The UK people welcomed me to this land and I finally found my freedom. I want to pay back."

Ms Park first tried to flee the world's most reclusive state in 1998, when it was in the grip of famine.

She and her younger brother trekked to China, where they were separated, and she was sold into a sham marriage with an alcoholic gambler.

After six years in China and having borne a son, she was arrested by the Chinese police and sent back alone to North Korea, where she was thrown into a detention camp for political criminals and forced to do backbreaking manual labour.

Life was a daily grind of "starvation, prison, torture", she said.

Thrown out of the camp after she became ill, Ms Park again journeyed into China and reclaimed her son before heading on to Mongolia in 2005 with other defectors, including one who became her husband. She headed to Beijing with the group and lived in hiding until a Christian pastor in 2007 directed her to the United Nations refugee agency.

Ms Park was eventually granted asylum in Britain with her husband and son in 2008 and resettled in Bury in north-west England. The former school teacher learned English at an adult college and became a human rights activist, publicising abuses in her homeland and helping other North Koreans to settle in Britain.

"Bury is my motherland," said Ms Park, who joined the Conservatives in 2016. The centre-right party's policy on asylum seekers is less welcoming than others, but she sees no contradiction in running under its banner after being selected to run as a ward councillor in Bury.

Her chances of success in May are slim, however. The Bury ward is a stronghold of the opposition Liberal Democrats, and in previous elections in 2019, the Conservative candidate came in a distant fifth.

But merely being able to stand in a free, multi-party election is a distinct novelty for Ms Park.

Elections to North Korea's Parliament are limited to a single candidate chosen by leader Kim Jong Un's ruling party.

Professor Hazel Smith, a North Korea expert at the School of Oriental and African Studies in London, said the regime in Pyongyang largely treats defectors in the West as "irrelevant", though it does monitor higher-profile figures.

"It's certainly news that a North Korean is standing to be a Conservative in the UK," she said.

Ms Park said regime operatives have not given her any unwelcome attention since she took on a political profile, and she would not be silenced if they did.

"They took away everything - my past, my family, my friends, but they never killed our spirit," she said.

AGENCE FRANCE-PRESSE