South Korean president Park Geun-hye forced from office by constitutional court

South Korean president Park Geun-hye forced from office by constitutional court(theguardian.com)

4 points by mismatchpair 9 years ago | 3 comments

Hi, I'm a native of Seoul and have attended most of the anti-Park government candlelight rallies held every Saturday for the past 20 weeks in Seoul. A total of over 15 million people have attended these nationwide protests during this time with a single day record of 2.32 million people in attendance on Dec. 3rd, 2016. All of these civil protests have been peaceful without any incidents of violence, vandalism, looting, or even littering. Just ordinary people wanting a corrupt government to be outed, the court system to do its due diligence, and chaebols (Samsung, SK, Lotte, etc.) to be persecuted for cronyism with the government. You get a real feeling of solidarity just being among the people. Take a look at this exhilarating video - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3fC9lhyzjDI - people doing a candlelight wave in one of the protests held in downtown Seoul. I'll be online all day today, so feel free to ask me questions about any of this or the current political situation in Korea.

Amygaz 9 years ago |

A comment and two questions:

First of all, your story shows the high level of commitment a population has to put to see a corrupted politician being punished, and also faith in the judicial system.

Do you know if anything will be done or can be done to prevent that from happening again?

My impression from loosely following this over the past 4 months or so is that, I feel like what she is being accused of is only slightly worst than what a great number of politicians in Washington DC are considering business as usual. How crooked is the system on Korea compared with the US (or the UK I guess, since you're linking the guardian)?

mismatchpair 9 years ago | |

Yes, you're right. There was a high level of commitment by the overwhelming majority of the population (~80% of the population was in favor of impeachment vs ~12% against), but the reason people kept showing up weekend after weekend for the demonstrations was due to a lack of faith in all three branches of government, i.e. it was to keep public pressure on the legislative, judicial, and to a lesser extent the executive branches. The day the most people showed up (2.32 million, Dec. 3rd, 2016) was the week before the parliament passed the impeachment bill. People really wanted to express their determination and anger as even some opposition party members were balking at the idea of impeaching the president (we have 300 members of parliament, 200 votes were needed for the bill to pass, and 234 voted in favor).

> Do you know if anything will be done or can be done to prevent that from happening again?

My understanding is that in a democratic system, there is always the risk of putting someone like Park (or a more dramatic example is Hitler) in power. A sign of a well-functioning democracy is whether appropriate social mechanisms exist so that people can freely exercise the power to take back and undo what they think is a mistake. I think history shows the only thing that works to prevent these kinds of mistakes is an informed public, educating the masses, and taking an active role (however small) in social and political matters.

> How crooked is the system on Korea compared with the US?

During the past 10 years in Korea (which was under a conservative government), transparency indices dropped dramatically across the board, e.g. social, financial, political, freedom of press. Transparency International (http://www.transparency.org/) puts out a report every year on government corruption, and in 2016 Korea placed 52nd out of 176 countries (out of the 35 OECD countries Korea placed 29th). For comparison, the US placed 18th and the UK 10th out of 176 countries (Denmark and New Zealand tied for the top spot for being the least corrupt).

The charges ex-president Park faced in the impeachment trial (held in the constitutional court) are different than what she will now be facing in a criminal court. The constitutional court confirmed charges of extortion, abuse of power, and leaking government secrets, which were the basis for upholding the impeachment. Now, having been forced from power and no longer enjoying immunity, the criminal court will decide whether she's criminally guilty of these charges as well as bribery charges from Samsung, Hyundai, SK, Lotte, etc. which carries a minimum of 10 years to a maximum sentence of life in prison.