Top South Korean Court Upholds President’s Impeachment
Country heads for new election and massive political unrest
By: Shim Jae Hoon
Four months after declaring martial law on the night of December 3, South Korean President Yoon Suk Yeol has been found guilty of violating the constitution and ousted from office by the country’s Constitutional Court, which upheld the impeachment motion voted by the National Assembly on December 14.
The court’s widely-anticipated ruling, delivered on April 4, isn’t expected to end the country’s continuing political crisis, however, which is complicated by efforts to deal with the administration of US President Donald Trump at a time of slowing growth in Asia's fourth-largest economy and a shock move by Trump, in Washington yesterday, to unveil tariffs of 25 percent for South Korean exports.
The US is Seoul’s second biggest trading partner after China, with almost US$128 billion worth of exports of cars and car parts, semiconductors, and consumer goods. Acting President Han Duck-soo called for talks with the US over the impact of the threatened tariffs and ordered emergency support measures for businesses.
Yoon was found guilty of trying to seize emergency power and dismissed from office by a unanimous vote. He is the second sitting president to have been impeached and removed from office after President Park Geun-hye in 2017, who was convicted on charges of abusing presidential power and taking bribes.
South Korean voters are acutely divided between conservative supporters of Yoon’s People Power Party and center-left constituents endorsing the opposition Democratic Party, which controls 170 seats in the 300-seat parliament. The divisions run so deep that a change of government power between the two sides hasn’t matured their relationships.
Animosity on the side of the Democratic Party, based mainly in the urban working class and farmers in the southwest of the country, runs so deep that it often appears irreconcilable with urban, business-oriented conservative voters. For example, the party’s top judiciary legislator has openly called for Yoon to be “executed on charges of attempted insurrection,” thus provoking further alarm from the conservatives.
The deep-seated animosity is expected to sharpen in the coming weeks and months as the nation prepares for new polls to choose Yoon’s replacement in June which is required by the constitution to be held within 60 days. Han Duck-soo will stay on as acting president until a new leader is sworn in.
To exacerbate the already sharp animosity, the Democratic Party leader Lee Jae Myung, the opposition presidential hopeful, is himself a highly controversial figure, facing a host of criminal corruption charges. His repeated evasion of court summons to answer the charges has fired a public uproar, with one assailant under arrest for unsuccessfully attempting to assassinate him. A populist figure, Lee lost the last presidential election to Yoon by a razor-thin margin of less than one-percentage point. The conservatives have a wide-open field of candidates to face Lee, with no clear front-runner.
In the constitutional court’s ruling, which took an exceptionally long three months to reach, the eight sitting judges ruled that Yoon’s illegal declaration of martial law amounted to illegally usurping the constitution for political purposes. Their unanimous decision declared that Yoon’s argument that he had to resort to an extraordinary steps of martial law because the opposition party’s obstructionism on the floors of parliament, including repeated impeachment motions against the administration’s appointees and refusal to consider the fiscal budget bill could not be considered sufficient grounds for declaring martial law.
Yoon was accused of using the martial law declaration as an excuse to suppress his political opponents. The court dismissed his claim that his declaration of martial law was intended as a short action to warn the opposition, without any serious attempt to stop legislators from entering the parliament building.
The constitutional court, however, found Yoon guilty of mobilizing armed troops and defying his own cabinet’s opposition to the martial law declaration as an illegal action. Yoon, in effect, launched a coup with support from his defense minister, who is now in jail, and a couple of army generals responsible for military intelligence. However, the generals have denied supporting Yoon’s action.
The court’s unanimous ruling has removed any potential for future discord about its ruling. Yoon’s failure to attempt a coup constitutes a valuable political lesson in a country with a history of a couple of army coups d’état in the last century. President Park Chung Hee came to power in a coup in 1961 and managed to hold onto power for 18 years until his assassination in 1979. The late Park ruled the country with an iron fist by using intelligence and coercion, and compiled a controversial record on human rights violations.
Then-army general Chun Doo Hwan, Park’s top military intelligence chief, seized power in 1980. Both generals, however, left a record of rapid economic development, although their rule often resulted in harsh civilian oppression.
Ironically, however, their successful economic leadership ended up creating a political awareness that betrayed their own usefulness, resulting in the highly successful democratic revolution of 1987 that ended in criminalizing General Chun and his cohorts.
Ironically, President Yoon, a civilian prosecutor general, has now been found guilty of trying to imitate Park and Chun. Yoon clearly misread his own countrymen’s political maturity. On the night of his coup attempt, thousands of people, mostly young men and women, surged to the National Assembly as armed soldiers sought to surround the parliament building. They confronted the armed soldiers and some blocked them from entering the parliament building and seizing legislators by force.
It was a glaring demonstration of how South Koreans had changed in their political maturity. As President Yoon sought to push through an endorsement by his legislative followers of the martial law edict, citizens around the National Assembly refused. Nor did any member of the cabinet stand up to support Yoon’s declaration. Prime Minister Han Duck Soo stood and declared loudly No, with others following suit. It was a glaring demonstration of political change taking place in post-Park and post-Chun Korea.
On the night of December 3, it was only President Yoon who advocated a return to military rule, who stood alone, watching the new era unfold as he adjourned the cabinet session. South Korea had become a different country, and Yoon lost his job.