Timothy Cho is a North Korean human rights activist and two-time defector. He has been imprisoned four times in North Korea and China. Cho’s parents fled North Korea, abandoning him to become a homeless member of the “hostile class”, constituted of families of defectors. Cho first tried to follow them aged 17, escaping into China before being forcibly repatriated to North Korea. After his return he was imprisoned and brutally tortured by the regime. Cho still tried to escape again, this time reaching Shanghai before being deported to the Philippines, before eventually settling in the UK.