Why arresting South Korea’s impeached President proves difficult

  • January 15, 2025
Why arresting South Korea’s impeached President proves difficult

Just before dawn on Wednesday, 3,000 police officers arrived at the heavily fortified residence of South Korea’s suspended President Yoon Suk Yeol.

Their mission: to arrest him.

Investigators used ladders to scale over buses and bolt croppers to cut through barbed wire as they broke through multiple blockades that were designed to stop them. Others hiked up nearby trails to reach the presidential residence.

Hours later, they arrested him.

This was their second attempt. Their first, which took place earlier this month, had seen some 150 officers face a six-hour deadlock with the president’s security detail.

They were helplessly outnumbered, first by the large number of pro-Yoon supporters who had gathered outside his residence to stop the police, and then by a human wall of security officers inside the property.

Eventually, investigators concluded that it was “practically impossible” to arrest him – and left.

By many accounts, Yoon is now a disgraced leader – impeached and suspended from his presidential duties, while he awaits the decision of the constitutional court, which can remove him from office.

So why has it been so difficult to arrest him?

The men guarding the president

It has been an unprecedented few weeks for South Korea since Yoon’s shocking yet short-lived martial law order on 3 December.

Lawmakers voted to impeach him, then came a criminal investigation and his refusal to appear for questioning, which was what sparked the arrest warrant.

One key roadblock for the arresting officers had been Yoon’s presidential security team, which on 3 January had formed a human wall and used vehicles to block the officers’ path.

Analysts said they could have acted out of loyalty to Yoon, pointing to the fact that Yoon himself had appointed several leaders of the Presidential Security Service (PSS).

“It may well be the case that Yoon has seeded the organisation with hardline loyalists in preparation for precisely this eventuality,” says US-based lawyer and Korea expert Christopher Jumin Lee.

An ‘incompetent’ agency

But the organisation that has really come under the spotlight is the Corruption Investigation Office for High-ranking Officials (CIO), which is jointly leading the investigation with the police,

There have been questions raised about how it failed to arrest Yoon on its first try, with critics accusing it of being unprepared and lacking coordination.

The agency was created four years ago by the previous administration, in response to public anger over former president Park Geun-hye who was impeached, removed from office and later jailed over a corruption scandal.

This month’s failed attempt was a “further black eye” for the CIO, which already “does not have a great reputation, for both political and capability reasons”, says Mason Richey, an associate professor at Seoul’s Hankuk University of Foreign Studies.

 
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