Dr. Pillkyu Hwang
 
Dr. Pillkyu Hwang is a human rights lawyer at Gonggam Human Rights Law Foundation and a former adjunct professor in charge of the international human rights law clinic at Seoul National University (SNU) Law School. The main areas of his research, advocacy and field work include international human rights, migration, refugees, business and human rights, international adoptees, alternative childcare, North Korean escapees, disaster and human rights, and access to justice in general both in Korea and around the world.
He graduated from SNU with an LL.B. and has earned his PhD in public international law at the same university. He was a visiting academic at the Centre on Migration, Policy and Society (COMPAS) of Oxford University in 2007, and a visiting fellow at the Human Rights Program of Harvard Law School in 2011-2012.
He has been the Human Rights Committee coordinator of the Korean Bar Association (KBA) for 8 years and is now the chair of the KBA’s Special Committee on International Human Rights. He was a member of the Reform Committee within the National Human Rights Commission in 2017 and has been a President-nominated commissioner of the Special Commission on Social Disasters in Korea from 2018 to 2022.
He was the chair of the Asia Pacific Refugee Rights Network (APRRN) (2010-2012) and the Asian Consortium for Human Rights Based Access to Justice (Hrba2j-Asia) (2011-2017). he has served as a member of the Fortify Rights Advisory Board since 2015 and a member of the Developments in the Fields Panel of the Business and Human Rights Journal (Cambridge University Press) since 2019.