SEOUL – The legal representative for former defence minister Kim Yong-hyun, who is on trial accused of taking part in an insurrection led by President Yoon Suk Yeol, denied the president’s claim that he made a mistake in copying down the orders for the emergency martial law declared on Dec 3.
Mr Kim’s lawyer Lee Ha-sang told reporters on Jan 16 that “no mistakes were made” when writing the martial law decree, saying it was to “ban political activities in a situation where the National Assembly is neutralised and the state affairs are paralysed”.
“Minister Kim himself wrote the first draft and President Yoon of course reviewed the entire content. … They wrote it with the purpose to ban political activities, since the forces related to election rigging took control of the National Assembly via political activities, and (the decree) is justified,” Mr Lee said.
Mr Yoon said in his public address on Dec 3 that “anti-state forces” pose a threat to subvert the state, and has questioned the credibility of the parliamentary election that his party lost.
Prosecutors say Mr Yoon’s martial law decree contained clauses that are illegal and unconstitutional, namely the part that bans any form of political activities, specifically including that of the National Assembly. A president has no legal grounds to ban the National Assembly’s activities, and such a ban clashes with the Article 77 of the Constitution that states a president must lift the state of martial law when requested by a vote of the National Assembly.
In a written statement to the Constitutional Court, currently handling Mr Yoon’s impeachment trial, his lawyers claimed that the problematic first clause was directly copied by Mr Kim from martial law decrees from the past, from when the president had the right to dissolute the Parliament. They claimed that Mr Yoon made the mistake of overlooking the wrongly-written clause.
“(Mr Yoon) did not try to ban all (political activities) of the National Assembly, but tried to stop the ‘anti-state activities’ during the state of martial law,” his legal representatives said.
But unlike what the presidential lawyers have claimed, no martial law declared by the administrations in the past have ever imposed a ban specifically on the National Assembly.
During the reigns of dictatorial leaders Park Chung-hee and Chun Doo-hwan, the president did have constitutional rights to dissolute the Parliament, before the clause was removed in the constitutional revision of 1987.
There were two cases in history which a martial law decree had mentioned a ban on political activities: one in 1972 and another in 1980.
In October of 1972, then-President Park’s martial law said it will impose “ban on all political activities, and all political demonstrations and rallies with political purposes”. Chun in May of 1980, during his rise to power and just before the bloody crackdown on pro-democracy protestors in Gwangju, also imposed a similar ban on political activities and protests.
But neither of the martial law decrees mentioned anything on banning activities of the National Assembly, bringing into question the president’s assertion that the contentious clause was copied from past decrees. THE KOREA HERALD/ASIA NEWS NETWORK
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