Yoon’s impeachment trial to start Tuesday

Seoul
Thirty-one days after President Yoon Suk Yeol was suspended from office by parliament, a trial is set to begin Tuesday at the Constitutional Court to review his impeachment and determine the fate of the embattled leader.
Despite his earlier resolve to attend the hearing, Yoon will not be present in the courtroom on Tuesday due to security concerns, his legal representatives said Sunday. They cited the possibility of investigators attempting to execute an arrest warrant for the president while he is en route to the court in Jongno-gu, Seoul.
Representatives from both sides — Yoon and the National Assembly — will likely engage in intense arguments over the validity of the impeachment charges, which relate to Yoon’s declaration of martial law on Dec. 3, 2024. The court has already scheduled five hearings — two per week — until Feb. 4. The matter of whether a sitting president would appear in court has been at the center of contention, as his predecessors — the late former President Roh Moo-hyun and former President Park Geun-hye — did not. Yoon has repeatedly emphasized that he would prioritize the impeachment trial, though he has refused to comply with summonses from investigators in separate criminal cases related to the martial law decree.
It is likely that Tuesday’s hearing will be relatively brief due to Yoon’s absence, and the justices will start addressing the issues from Thursday at the second hearing in case Yoon fails to appear at the first one.
In 2017, justices ended the first hearing of former President Park’s impeachment trial in nine minutes due to her absence.
Defendants are requested to appear at the Constitutional Court, but it is not mandatory, and the trial can proceed in their absence.
In the trial, the National Assembly’s impeachment committee is tasked with proving that Yoon committed significant violations of the Constitution and the law, and therefore should be removed from office.
The National Assembly contends that Yoon’s actions — including declaring martial law, ordering the issuance of Martial Law Decree No. 1, deploying the military and police to obstruct parliamentary activities, ordering troops to raid the National Election Commission, and directing the arrest of judges — constitute serious violations of the Constitution and laws such as the Martial Law Act.
The two parties have also been locking horns over a charge of insurrection, a violation of criminal law, which was previously included in the impeachment bill.
In an apparent effort to expedite the trial, the National Assembly deliberately excluded criminal charges such as insurrection and abuse of power from the impeachment motion, focusing solely on whether he violated constitutional rather than criminal law, for the judges to review.
Yoon’s team has countered this approach, arguing that excluding the insurrection charge undermines the core of the impeachment bill, rendering the basis for impeaching the president invalid.
In a statement released last week, Yoon’s lawyers said that “the withdrawal of the insurrection charge is not merely the removal of one of two charges, but constitutes the retraction of nearly 80 percent of the impeachment resolution’s content.”
Meanwhile, legal experts expect that the court will conclude the hearings by late February or early March and make a decision by the latter half of March, considering the precedents of previous presidential impeachment cases.
In 2017, it took 92 days for Park to receive a ruling on March 10 after the impeachment motion was passed on Dec. 9, 2016. For Roh, it took 63 days from his impeachment on March 12, 2004 to the ruling on May 14, 2004.
The court has 180 days, or until June 11, to decide Yoon’s fate. The case was filed on Dec. 14.