South Korea, death penalty sought for former President Yoon
The protagonist of the failed self-coup in December 2024 is charged with insurrection
from our correspondent
NEW DELHI - The special prosecutor investigating the failed coup d'état in South Korea in 2024 has demanded that former President Yoon Suk Yeol be sentenced to death for the crime of insurrection. Although decades have passed since the last execution, the South Korean penal code still provides for the death penalty for extremely serious offences such as those committed by Yoon when he imposed martial law late in the evening of 3 December 2024, if only for a few hours.
The 65-year-old former president has always rejected the accusations, claiming that the imposition of the civil liberties suspension measure was part of his prerogatives and that he acted to raise awareness about the parliamentary obstructionism of opposition parties. Yoon had been politically powerless by his party's electoral defeat in the April 2024 parliamentary elections.
Faced with the impossibility of pursuing his conservative political agenda, the former president first tried to provoke an incident with North Korea that would justify the imposition of martial law, then, faced with the failure of this reckless strategy, he resorted to what was to all intents and purposes an attempted self-coup.
Yoon backed down after, on the very night of the failed authoritarian turn, a handful of parliamentarians managed to rocambly get together and reject the measure. The following weeks were marked first by large demonstrations and then by Yoon's impeachment. South Korea elected a new president - the progressive Lee Jae Myung - last June.
