Impeaching the Impeachment

She returned to the public’s eye as a politician in 1998 and was elected fourteen years later as the 18th President of the Republic with 51.6% of the popular vote against Moon Jae-in’s 48%. She became the first unwed, single female president in Korea’s modern history, and the first to step into office that her father had served. It is an incredible story of a person whose fortitude and resilience triumphed over unbelievable personal tragedy and suffering.

Under her leadership, South Korea achieved remarkable reforms in many areas. She did her best to steer South Korea to make advances as a liberal democracy and market economy again. With only one year remaining until the end of a single-term five year presidency, however, half of the members from her political party joined members of the opposition party who formed the majority in the National Assembly to impeach President Park on December 9th, 2016 and her presidential power was suspended. She was facing political betrayal and tragedy just as her parents had faced some forty years ago. Three months later, the eight Constitutional Court Justices unanimously voted in support of the National Assembly’s motion to impeach President Park on March 10th, 2017, making her the first president to be ousted from office before one’s term is over. Her misfortune did not end there.

Accused of having accepted bribery of over 77 billion won (or approximately 66 million US dollars), President Park Geun-hye was not only imprisoned and put in solitary confinement even before a court hearing, she had to suffer the humiliation of being taken to court in handcuffs. Then in 2018, she received a 33-year prison sentence and a fine of 18 billion won (or approximately 15.5 million US dollars). She is currently awaiting for the final decision by the Supreme Court.

I graduated from Seoul National University Law School in 1967. Then I went to serve as a military judicial officer, then became a judge, a lawyer, and eventually a law professor. My life and career has been in law. I served as the Chair of the Korean Bar Association from 2009 for two years. Then after I resigned in 2012, I moved to the U.S. where I had a chance to focus on a comparative study between Korean and U.S. law as a visiting scholar at UCLA. When candlelight vigils and protests to impeach President Park began, I had a hunch that if the so called ‘candlelight revolution’ succeeded, it would mean the end of the rule of law followed by the dismantling of liberal democracy. Watching the events unfold from the other side of the Pacific Ocean, it seemed no one in Korea was noticing these dangerous signs. Driven by a desire to stop the dismantling of my beloved homeland into an uncivilized society like North Korea without human rights, I decided to participate in the anti-impeachment movement to warn the public about the dangers of the impeachment process underway. I began posting a short essay almost every day on social media explaining for the lay public the reasons why an impeachment without proper evidence nor due process was wrong and the threat this would pose to the very foundation of the republic. I was submitting two posts every three days for seven weeks during the height of the ‘candlelight vigil and protest’ from early December 2016 until mid-January 2017. Many fellow countrymen confessed to me later that it was through my posts they had learned why the impeachment was unjustified and dangerous.

In late January 2017, my writings were compiled into a book and published by Chogabje Dot-com under the title, “Indicting the Impeachment”. Forty thousand copies of it had been sold. After seeing my book, President Park’s team contacted me. I was asked to prepare a case before the courts. I accepted wholeheartedly and did it pro bono. I did my utmost and prepared as best as I knew how, but it was all in vain. On March 10, 2017, the eight justices of the Constitutional Court approved the impeachment motion. It was a very difficult decision for me to comprehend. Of course, many people were disappointed just like me by the unexpected outcome.

In an interview with Chosun Daily (http://news.chosun.com/site/data/html_dir/2019/01/15/2019011500034.html), a British journalist who had witnessed the nation’s turbulent politics, economics, and history-making events for over three decades said, “Korea’s democracy is ruled not by law but by people who turned into wild masses” when asked about the impeachment process. He went further to say that even when it came to her sentence, he could not understand what exactly she had done wrong to warrant a 30 year prison sentence, when there was no dead body in the Blue House nor billions of dollars stashed away in a private Swiss account. As far as he could tell, there was no evidence to prove any of the charges made against her. If he had been one of the judges, he said he would simply go about his job regardless of how many people poured out into the streets or the city square.