Death sentence sought for ex-South Korea leader Yoon over martial law decree

Then South Korea's ousted former president Yoon Suk Yeol who is facing charges of orchestrating a rebellion when he declared martial law, arrives to attend his trial at the Seoul Central District Court in Seoul, South Korea, Monday, May 12, 2025. (AP Photo/Ahn Young-joon, Pool, File)

SEOUL, South Korea -- An independent counsel has demanded a death sentence for former South Korean President Yoon Suk Yeol on rebellion charges in connection with his short-lived imposition of martial law in December 2024.

The Seoul Central District Court said independent counsel Cho Eun-suk’s team made the request at a hearing Tuesday. Yoon was expected to make Removed from office last April, Yoon faces criminal trials over his martial law debacle and other scandals related to his time in office. Charges that he directed a rebellion are the most significant ones.

The court is expected to deliver a verdict on Yoon in February.

Yoon has maintained that his decree was a desperate yet peaceful attempt to raise public awareness about what he considered the danger of the liberal opposition Democratic Party, which used its legislative majority to obstruct his agenda and complicate state affairs.

Yoon called the opposition-controlled parliament “a den of criminals” and “anti-state forces.” But lawmakers rushed to object to the imposition of martial law in dramatic overnight scenes, and enough of them, including even those within Yoon’s ruling party, managed to enter an assembly hall to vote down the decree.

Yoon’s decree, the first of its kind in more than 40 years in South Korea, brought armed troops into Seoul streets to encircle the assembly and enter election offices. That evoked traumatic memories of dictatorships in the 1970s and 1980s, when military-backed rulers used martial law and other emergency decrees to station soldiers, tanks and armored vehicles in public places to suppress pro-democracy protests.

Yoon’s decree and ensuing power vacuum plunged South Korea into political turmoil, halted the country’s high-level diplomacy and rattled its financial markets.

Yoon’s earlier vows to fight attempts to impeach and arrest him deepened the country’s political divide. In January last year, he became the country’s first sitting president to be detained.

By Hyung-jin Kim