Ex-North Korean envoy appointed vice minister in South Korea

Former North Korean diplomat Tae Yongho was selected as the new head of the presidential advisory council on unification by the South Korean President Yoon Suk Yeol, the Yonhap news agency reported on Thursday.

Among the 34,000 North Koreans resettled in the South, Tae becomes the highest-ranking defector with the new role.

His appointment at the Unification council also makes him the first North Korean defector designated to a vice-ministerial job in South Korea.

As the new head of the unification council, he will be advising on peaceful Korean unification.

"He is the right person to help establish a peaceful unification policy based on liberal democracy and garner support from home and abroad," Yeoul's office said in a statement.

Tae has advocated for a Russia-Ukraine-like prisoner swap between the North and the South saying, "our people's lives matter."

Who is Tae Yongho?

Born in Pyongyang in 1962, Tae was a minister of the North Korean Embassy in London.

In 2016, he fled to South Korea and later was also elected as a lawmaker of the ruling People Power Party from the affluent district of Gangnam in Seoul. He was the first former North Korean to be directly elected to South Korea's National Assembly, according to South Korean newspaper The Korea Times.

As a lawmaker, he was also appointed as the head of the parliamentary foreign affairs and unification committee.

In his statements earlier, Tae has said he defected to South Korea because he wanted to live in a Korean democracy and didn't want his children to have "miserable" lives in North Korea.

North Korea has denounced Tae as "human scum" and accused him of a number of criminal acts, including child molestation and embezzlement of government funds.

Pyongyang also accuses Seoul of exploiting the defection of Tae for propaganda purposes to embarrass the North's leader, Kim Jong Un.

Edited by: Farah Bahgat