Update: South Korea's Constitutional Court hasn't made a decision yet concerning the impeachment resolution against suspended President Yoon Seok-yeol.

What is the holdup? Most people anticipated a decision this week, but that hasn't occurred yet nor has it been announced by the Constitutional Court in terms of scheduling. Now the consensus seems to be that a decision could come next week.

The tension and anticipation are great. Likely, there will be large demonstrations in Seoul particularly over the weekend. A major mobilization of national police forces and the building of barbed wire, and other metal fences, along with police bus wall barriers around the Constitutional Court Building are underway. The National Police want to protect the CC from the fate of the Western District Court House which was invaded and pillaged by right wing thugs not too long ago after they issued a detention warrant against Yoon.

(Source youtube 1.14 MBC News) 2 minute video shows police preparations for upcoming Constitutional Court's announcement of its determination concerning the impeachment of Yoon Seok-yeol.

Analysis varies on the causes of the Constitutional Court's delay in handing down a decision on whether the facts warrant Yoon's dismissal from office and approval of the National Assembly's impeachment resolution. At this point, all are speculative because the deliberations are secluded, and no leaks have occurred to my knowledge. I've listened to a number of these analyses and reached an assessment of my own, which is certainly no more authoritative than some of the well known South Korean pundits to whom I've been listening. As a non-Korean, US observer of South Korean affairs, my views could readily be impeached on that basis alone.

Most legal analysts assume, and rightly so, that the facts on their face from objective evidence, such as videos, documents, statements by participants in the attempted coup, such as Yoon himself and others, show Yoon's martial law announcement as a Constitutional violation by clear and convincing evidence. Yoon's defense largely involved denials, sophistry and conspiracy theories, and when those appeared to be unconvincing, resorted to procedural quibbling, to say that the impeachment effort itself was brought unlawfully. For example, "the National Assembly is a dictatorship" which justified the imposition of martial law.

The dubious latter argument is based upon two circumstances. The deadlock between the legislature and the presidential office was basically preceded by an absolutely unprecedented number of presidential vetoes. Many of these involved vetoes of repeated bills calling for special investigations of allegations of corruption on the part of Yoon's wife Kim Gon-hee. The second circumstance was that when special investigations were consistently rejected by the presidential office, impeachment resolutions were passed to impeach prosecutors involved in a faux investigation of Kim Gon-hee, which were then directed to the Constitutional Court.

There were other impeachment resolutions pending before the court, but the ones involving prosecutorial misconduct are the most material. This because Yoon's authoritarianism arose during his tenure as a senior prosecutor, and his constituency which still exists in the prosecution/private law firm world. The key thing to understand is that abuse of the administration of justice is the mechanism by which a minority of elites maintained their control of South Korea, after the fall of the dictatorships. Yoon's mastery of the abuse of the South Korean prosecutorial system is what catapulted him to power. The dictatorship of prosecutors is the key power structure in South Korea not only currently defending Yoon, but defending the entire aristocracy in South Korea from the press, from labor leaders, and from whatever other civic opposition might arise to their interests.

The Constitutional Court disposed of a number of these prosecutor impeachments this week by disapproving them. In other words, the prosecutors can remain in their posts. This can also be viewed critically as the Constitutional Court tacitly upholding the prosecutorial dominance of the South Korean government. Yoon once during litigation against himself as Prosecutor General described the Prosecutor General as a Constitutionally independent office, which is patently absurd, but paradoxically true in a deeper political and historical sense. Also this week, the current prosecutor general inexplicably declined to appeal after Yoon was inexplicably released from pre-trial detention by a trial court last week (the impeachment and criminal court proceedings are separate). None of this makes sense, unless one understands the innately corrupt nature of South Korean jurisprudence. A recent poll showed prosecutors were the least trusted public institution in the government.

The CC found this week in these other prosecutor impeachments, that the conduct of politically motivated, sloppy, incomplete, suspicious investigation followed by a later unjustifiable nolle prosse disposal of charges levied against the president's wife by the prosecutors involved, didn't arise to the level of a "constitutional violation" warranting dismissal from office via the impeachment process. At the same time, the unanimous opinion 8-0, emphasized neither was there anything abusive or improper in the bringing of an impeachment resolution against these prosecutors by the National Assembly. The latter aspect of the opinion is used to bolster predictions that Yoon will in fact be dismissed from office by the CC in the very near future. I'm not so reassured, but I will take that at face value.

Look at this "pre-game" show, if you will, as a compromise signal from the CC Justices. The message is this, the old order of prosecutorial dominance of political affairs in collusion with the traditional South Korean media, will not be threatened by this court. The aristocracy and its forces on the right can still hide behind the overly powerful dictatorship of prosecutors. One might even infer, if you want to get rid of corrupt prosecutors, elect a different president. He or she can then appoint and fire whomever. Class interests will not be affected. So those among you who earned your family fortunes from the Japanese exploitation of Korea, or the decades of subsequent dictatorships that followed have nothing to fear from us. Perhaps this will give a license to the Constitutional Court to preserve the appearance of democracy, because that's all it is, by dismissing Yoon from office as soon as possible. Yet, if Yoon is restored to office, the threat of a military dictatorship is real.

For the record I want to post a link to Gregory Elich's great article describing in detail to what the Yoon martial law plan entailed and what a Yoon Seok-yeol dictatorship would look like should it succeed.

Yoon Suk Yeol’s Violent Vision for South Korea