March 7 (UPI) — South Korea’s embattled president, Yoon Suk Yeol, was expected to be freed from a Seoul detention center after a court Friday voided the warrant under which he was arrested in January on insurrection charges after an abortive effort to impose martial law.
The Seoul Central District Court said the decision was to “ensure procedural clarity and eliminate doubts regarding the legality of the investigation process,” after ruling the warrant to extend Yoon’s detention beyond the maximum 48-hour period had been filed too late.
CNN reported that Yoon, 64, would be released later Friday after the facility where he was being held received the paperwork from the court, but NBC quoted his legal team as saying he would remain in custody for now as prosecutors had seven days to appeal the ruling.
The prosecutor’s office has yet to comment.
“This is justice served. Though delayed, it was a decision that had to be made,” Shin Dong-wook, spokesman for Yoon’s conservative People Power Party said in a statement.
Yoon, the first sitting president of the republic to be indicted on criminal charges, was arrested Jan. 15 at the second attempt after a standoff with his security detail and hundreds of protestors forced authorities to abandon an earlier attempt to take him into custody.
Yoon is alleged to have hatched a conspiracy with former Defense Minister Kim Yong-hyun and others to incite an insurrection on Dec. 3 through the declaration of an unconstitutional and unlawful state of emergency.
Declaring a state of emergency is legal only in the case of imminent war, armed conflict, or a comparable national crisis.
Korean presidents enjoy immunity from prosecution for most criminal charges — with insurrection being one of the few exceptions.
Welcoming the ruling, Yoon’s lawyers said it set the record straight on what rules and principles were applicable in criminal cases and demonstrated that the rule of law was alive and well in South Korea.
They had argued in court that the body that requested the warrant, the Corruption Investigation Office for High Ranking Officials, also had no jurisdiction over the crime of insurrection.
But the court was unable to make a determination on jurisdiction due to the lack of any existing laws covering the issue, or legal precedent from the Supreme Court.
Yoon’s office praised the stance taken by the court, accusing the CIO of an “unlawful, performative investigation despite lacking jurisdiction.”
The National Assembly voted to impeach Yoon in December, 10 days after he deployed the South Korean military into Yeouido in an effort to disrupt a vote by lawmakers to overturn his declaration of martial law.
The assembly succeeded in voting on the motion, voting unanimously to lift martial law –with Yoon withdrawing his martial law declaration six hours later in the early hours of Dec. 4.
Yoon apologized to the Korean people in a closing statement last week to the Constitutional Court, which is amid a 180-day deliberation at the end of which it must decide whether to remove or rei-instate Yoon, but said that invoking martial law was a last-was a last-ditch gamble to save the country from the “anti-state tyranny” of the opposition Democratic Party.
He said that he only intended it as a demonstration of the depth of national crisis in the country.
