Park Won Soon

2006 Ramon Magsaysay Awardee for Public Service from South Korea. Despite imprisonment as a university student during South Korea's military dictatorship, Park Won Soon completed his legal studies and threw himself headlong into the country's burgeoning democracy movement. Forgoing the rewards of a conventional legal career, he defended the rights of political prisoners, and victims of media censorship, torture, and other abuses. In 1994 he helped form the People's Solidarity for Participatory Democracy (PSPD), then led the organization's campaign against corruption in the judiciary, in government contracts, in chaebols. PSPD mounted a controversial effort to blacklist candidates "unfit to run" in the 2000 parliamentary elections; of the eighty-six candidates in the PSPD blacklist, fifty-nine were rejected by the voters. After seeing PSPD become a national force, Park stepped down as its head; in 2002 he assumed leadership of The Beautiful Foundation, which challenges everyone in Korean society to donate just one percent of their income or time, then redistributes the money to the needy and to public-interest groups. More than 26,000 have done so, rekindling traditional Korean habits of generosity.