From martial law to the dock: a president's year on trial

Shortly after ten on the night of 3 December 2024, the president of South Korea, Yoon Suk Yeol, appeared on television and declared emergency martial law, citing what he called anti-state forces threatening to paralyse the country. The decree banned the National Assembly, political parties and public gatherings, and placed the media under the control of the martial law command. For a few hours, soldiers and police moved towards the Assembly building, and helicopters set down on its grounds. Then the Assembly defied the order. Lawmakers climbed and slipped past the cordon to reach the chamber, and voted 190 to zero to lift the decree. Yoon’s government accepted the vote within hours, and by early morning the crisis was over, six hours after it began. It was the first martial law in South Korea in forty-five years.

What followed was not a crisis of six hours but a reckoning that has lasted most of a year. On 14 December the National Assembly impeached Yoon, suspending his powers. On 31 December a court issued an arrest warrant, the first ever against a sitting South Korean president. On 15 January investigators entered his residence and took him into custody; eleven days later he was indicted, charged as the suspected ringleader of an insurrection. He was released from detention in March after a court granted his request, and on 4 April the Constitutional Court unanimously upheld the impeachment, making him a former president. An early presidential election followed in June, and the opposition won it.

The criminal trial that began in April has become the longest chapter. Prosecutors and a special counsel team argue that the martial law decree was a plan to seize control of the state, that troops were meant to drag lawmakers out of the chamber, that arrest lists were drawn up, and that the emergency was manufactured. Yoon’s defence tells a different story: a warning, a display of resolve against a parliament that had crippled his government, a decree that ended quickly because it was always meant to, and a prosecution driven by political enemies. The courtroom has heard witnesses on both sides. Yoon stayed away through most of the summer, skipping ten consecutive hearings on health grounds, then appeared on 26 September for the first time in eighty-five days, denied the charges, and listened as the court began questioning key witnesses. Fifteen further sessions are scheduled before December.

The two accounts cannot both be true, and deciding which one holds is the court’s job. What has been striking so far is how much of the system held up under the weight of the case. The Assembly voted within hours on a night when soldiers were outside its doors. The Constitutional Court reached its decision while large parts of the public were furious either way. The criminal trial continues even though the defendant is a former head of state. None of this was smooth, and South Korean politics is more polarized now than it was before the crisis. But the machinery that was supposed to process the accusation did not break.

It is tempting, in cases like this, to treat the crowd as the jury. On the streets of Seoul, both sides were certain long before the courts finished: certain that the martial law was a coup, certain that it was a legitimate warning. The country will not settle that argument quickly, whatever the verdict says. But there is a quieter point worth keeping. A president who once moved against his own parliament now sits through hearings as an ordinary defendant, questioned under the same rules as anyone else. Institutions that make even the powerful wait are easy to mock when they are slow. They are also the only ones that leave room for the truth to be established, and for the record to show, later, that it was.