Showdown in South Korea, after the failed coup d’état | EUROtoday

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From our correspondent

NEW DELHI – With a call that leaves little doubt in regards to the local weather of reckoning that reigns within the nation, a court docket in Seoul yesterday sentenced former South Korean prime minister Han Duck-soo to 23 years in jail for his function within the sensational failed self-coup plotted by former president Yoon Suk Yeol in December 2023. The prosecution had requested for 15.

According to guage Lee Jin-kwan, regardless of the function of prime minister giving him particular obligations, the 76-year-old Han was responsible of collaborating in an rebel, creating the situations for “the population to return to living under a dictatorship for a long time”. Because of the alternatives made by Han, the Justice of the Peace stated, “South Korea ran the risk of returning to a dark past, in which the liberal democratic order and basic people’s rights were violated.”

Han was discovered responsible of the intense crime of rebel, of perjury – the one cost for which he admitted duty – and of forging an official doc. Reading out the ruling, the decide stated Han performed a key function in making it seem that the choice to impose martial legislation had been made within the Council of Ministers and likened the plan to “an insurrection from above.” Not solely that. Han was additionally discovered responsible of getting mentioned with different senior authorities figures measures to forestall the functioning of establishments essential to the democratic lifetime of the nation similar to Parliament. It was exactly the failure of this final a part of the subversive plan that decided the failure of the coup.

On the evening of December 3, 2023, instantly after the tv announcement of the imposition of martial legislation and regardless of the army within the streets, a handful of parliamentarians managed to succeed in the Parliament space, climb over the fences and collect to reject with a vote President Yoon’s tried coup, averting a return to a previous, not too distant, dotted with army regimes and repression of dissent and civil liberties.