South Korea probe team seeks indictment of Yoon over martial law

Soo-Hyang Choi, Bloomberg News on Jan 23, 2025

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South Korean anti-corruption agency asked prosecutors to indict impeached President Yoon Suk Yeol on insurrection charges after wrapping up a preliminary investigation into his ill-fated martial law declaration.

The Corruption Investigation Office for High-ranking Officials said they have decided to send Yoon’s case to the Seoul Central District Prosecutors’ Office on Thursday.

The announcement comes after Yoon had been stonewalling the probe team’s efforts to secure answers about his role in imposing the martial law, despite his arrest last week. That raised questions over the agency’s ability to follow through on the investigation into a sitting president.

Yoon has questioned the validity of the probe launched by the CIO, and said the martial law declaration was within his constitutional powers.

“We thought it’d be more efficient for the prosecutors’ office, which has to decide whether to indict him, to comprehensively look into the materials gathered so far and conduct additional investigation as needed to reveal the truth behind this case,” Lee Jae-seung, the deputy head of the agency, told reporters.

It was not immediately clear if Yoon would change tack and agree to sit down with prosecutors for questioning after the transfer of the case. Before becoming president, Yoon was a star prosecutor who investigated a number of high-profile cases, including one into former President Park Geun-hye who was removed from office in 2017 and later imprisoned.

Yoon shocked the nation with his abrupt martial law declaration on Dec. 3, a move that sent the won plunging and has been partly blamed for South Korea’s weaker economy growth forecasts for this year. The short-lived decree ultimately led to his impeachment and the first-ever arrest of a sitting president in South Korea.

Prosecutors are expected to indict Yoon in early February before the detention period granted by a district court expires, South Korea’s Yonhap News said. If indicted by then, Yoon will stay in detention while a trial that is likely to continue for months takes place.

Speaking at his impeachment trial on Thursday, Yoon said the martial law ended faster than he had expected, but he didn’t see it as a failure.

“This is not a failed martial law,” Yoon said at the Constitutional Court. “I also thought it would end quickly but it just ended faster than I’d expected.”

At the trial, Yoon’s former Defense Minister Kim Yong-hyun appeared as a witness and admitted drafting the martial law decree that banned political activities. Kim also said he ordered his subordinate to keep an eye on key politicians, but denied ordering their arrest. Kim himself was arrested and indicted last month for his involvement in the martial law declaration.

Yoon’s martial law decree has left the country in a leadership vacuum at a crucial time when Donald Trump was sworn in as the 47th president of the U.S. Businesses and policymakers are concerned about the possibility of Trump imposing trade tariffs while the ongoing political turbulence is weighing heavily on consumer confidence.

The Constitutional Court has six months to decide whether to permanently remove Yoon from office. If the court upholds Yoon’s impeachment, it would trigger a presidential election within 60 days.