January 13, 2025
Seoul – Thirty-one days after President Yoon Seok-yeol was suspended by parliament, the Constitutional Court is scheduled to begin a trial on Tuesday to review his impeachment and determine the embattled leader’s fate.
Yin's legal representatives said on Sunday that despite Yin's earlier determination to attend the hearing, he would not attend Tuesday's court due to security concerns. They noted that investigators may try to execute an arrest warrant against the president while he is on his way to the Jongno District Court in Seoul.
Representatives from both parties, including Yoon and the National Assembly, are likely to fiercely debate the validity of the impeachment charges related to Yoon's declaration of martial law on December 3, 2024. – Until February 4th. Yoon has repeatedly stressed that he will prioritize an impeachment trial, even as he refuses to comply with subpoenas from investigators in a separate criminal case related to martial law.
Tuesday's hearing is likely to be relatively brief due to Yin's absence, and the judge will begin addressing the issues in a second hearing starting Thursday in case Yin fails to attend the first hearing.
In 2017, the judge ended the first hearing of former President Park Geun-hye's impeachment case in nine minutes due to Park Geun-hye's absence.
Defendants are required to appear before the Constitutional Court, but this is not mandatory and the trial can be held in their absence.
At the trial, the National Assembly's impeachment committee was tasked with proving that Mr. Yoon committed serious violations of the Constitution and the law and therefore should be removed from office.
The National Assembly believes that Yin's actions – including declaring martial law, ordering the issuance of Martial Law Order No. 1, deploying the military and police to obstruct parliamentary activities, ordering the military to attack the National Election Commission, and ordering the arrest of judges – constitute serious violations of the Constitution and martial law and other laws. Behavior.
The two parties are also at loggerheads over a charge of insurrection that violates the criminal code and was previously included in the impeachment bill.
In an apparent effort to speed up the trial, Congress deliberately excluded criminal charges such as insurrection and abuse of power from the impeachment motion, focusing only on whether he violated the Constitution rather than criminal law for judges to review.
Yoon's team pushed back against that approach, arguing that excluding insurrection charges undermined the core of the impeachment bill and invalidated the basis for impeaching the president.
In a statement released last week, Yoon Eun-hye's lawyers said, “Withdrawing the insurrection charge is not just dropping one of the two charges, but withdrawing nearly 80 percent of the impeachment resolution.”
At the same time, taking into account the precedent of previous presidential impeachment cases, legal experts expect the court to conclude the hearings at the end of February or early March and make a decision in late March.
In 2017, it took Park Geun-hye 92 days from the passing of the impeachment case on December 9, 2016, to the verdict on March 10. , 2004.
The court has 180 days, until June 11, to decide Yin's fate. The case was filed on December 14.
