South Korean president declares martial law, parliament votes to lift it (opens in new tab)

They're following the law. The Constitution obligates the President to lift martial law after the National Assembly nullifies it.

As the constitution is written, the nullification vote doesn't directly end martial law. It simply binds the president to withdraw martial law.

In hindsight, that might be a slight flaw, there doesn't seem to be any time limit or mechanism for what happens if the president doesn't. I'm not sure their constitution was written with an autocoup in mind.

In the end it wasn't an issue. The President did eventually withdraw martial law, I wonder what pressure was put on him to do so. And by who.

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Article 44

1. During the sessions of the National Assembly, no member of the National Assembly shall be arrested or detained without the consent of the National Assembly except in case of flagrante delicto.

2. In case of apprehension or detention of a member of the National Assembly prior to the opening of a session, such member shall be released during the session upon the request of the National Assembly, except in case of flagrante delicto.

Article 45

No member of the National Assembly shall be held responsible outside the National Assembly for opinions officially expressed or votes cast in the Assembly.

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(from https://www.constituteproject.org/constitution/Republic_of_K... linked elsewhere in this thread; "flagrante delicto" is a legal term of art for "being caught in the act". These provisions are similar to ones found in Article I section 6 of the US constitution.).

Edit to give additional credit where it's due:

According to the US Library of Congress, the US Speech or Debate clause is derived from a similar provision in the English Bill of Rights of 1689 and was adopted as part of the US constitution without much discussion.

https://constitution.congress.gov/browse/essay/artI-S6-C1-3-...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bill_of_Rights_1689

The longest a French Republic has lasted is 70 years. The fifth republic is today 66 years old. The ordinary can turn into the extraordinary in an afternoon.

Legislative elections take place at the midpoint between presidential elections, and the opposition kept their majority in 2024, so there was hardly a mandate, if anything the legislative elections indicated a rebuke.

Yoon Suk Yeol is the one of the most unpopular democratic heads of state with 19% approval and 72% disapproval.

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It's worth noting that it seems like he didn't talk to anyone about this and even the head of his party in the National Assembly said they would vote to overturn it.

There was a parliament election, with three blocks each gaining roughly a third of the seats.

The block that won the most seats (but not enough to have a majority) immediately declared they would never compromise/ally with anyone else. Essentially, if they were called on to form a government, they were almost certainly going to be immediately censured.

So Macron, rightly or wrongly depending on who you ask, decided to not call on them since he estimated it was bound to fail and waste time. Instead, he nominated someone from a (now) minor political force because, at least in theory, they were enough people willing to negotiate with them to form a majority. Looks like it didn't work in the end and now France will be stuck because no one is willing to compromise.

Broadly Parliament is split into 3 camps, the left, the centr, and the right, all pretty much even. Any two could work together as a coalition and agree to a leader, but that is proving harder.

That reason would be awful, and most likely the consequences too, but it's not readily obvious to me that the timing would be.

They previously wrote that "The National Assembly speaker has just said that South Korean troops are leaving the parliament building, the Yonhap news agency reports."

So I'm not sure if the military isn't unified in what to do, or if certain troops are just not enforcing the President's near certainly unconstitutional order. The Constitution gives the President many powers under martial law ("Under extraordinary martial law, special measures may be taken with respect to the necessity for warrants, freedom of speech, the press, assembly and association, or the powers of the Executive and the Judiciary as prescribed by law"), but it appears to give the President no powers over the National Assembly, so the "All political activities, including the activities of the National Assembly... are prohibited" part of his martial law declaration appears to be blatantly unconstitutional.

According to the constitution, "When the National Assembly requests the lifting of martial law with the concurrent vote of a majority of the total members of the National Assembly, the President shall comply." [2]

Some are saying the constitution doesn't give a timeframe for when the President has to comply, but if he doesn't soon, it definitely appears to be a self-coup. [3]

1. https://www.bbc.com/news/live/cn38321180et

2. https://www.constituteproject.org/constitution/Republic_of_K...

3. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Self-coup

    About our name

    Why “Rest of World”? It’s a corporate catchall term used in the West to designate “everyone else.” Companies use it to lump together people and markets outside wealthy Western countries. We like the term because it encapsulates the problems we fight head-on: a casual disregard for billions of people, and a Western-centric worldview that leaves an unthinkable number of insights, opportunities, and nuances out of the global conversation.

It certainly has issues in the depth of its coverage, the simplistic endings of its articles, occasional culture war snipes, and lots of other stuff. It’s far from perfect. But for my money it’s still the best general world news source out there, and I check most of them out regularly. I have so many conversations with coworkers and people I meet about their home countries that I just couldn’t without reading The Economist.

> The Republic of Korea (South Korea) is a liberal democracy that respects media freedom and pluralism. However, tradition and business interests often prevent journalists from fulfilling their role as watchdogs, and populist political tendencies stoke hatred of journalists.

https://rsf.org/en/country/south-korea

Taiwan is more free than Korea but due its political predicament, it is not a candidate for the bureaus. As for Japan, after a series of controversial bills were passed under Abe, their ranking dropped like a rock over the past decade and it is getting worse with so-called "press clubs" that are reluctant to criticise the govt due to how access is granted.

Of course, the military could refuse. In the abstract, I think that might be ideal. (I don't know enough to say whether that would be ideal in this situation.)

If they're actively fighting against the democratic principles (like enforcing martial law to distract from something rather than when really necessary) then yeah, I think we'd want them to take them down if they don't leave by themselves.

It shouldn't. People are complex - all of them. Many people do both good and bad things. We should celebrate and encourage the good even while condemning the bad.

Right. This is politics. Martial law would have meant the judiciary is irrelevant.

And Israelis don't kowtow to him at all, the same Israelis who were out protesting the judicial reform, the largest protests in Israeli history, are still very much against him.

Yoon Suk Yeol claimed he is protecting the country from "shameless pro-North Korean anti-state forces."

Now...

I do not doubt that NK has spies in SK, possibly some in government. I am sure there are some in SK who are happy to get a paycheck from NK to share some info. It's what any oppositional nation state would be trying to achieve.

But as far as literal "pro-North Korean" forces in SK, that seems close to literally impossible to me.

I cannot imagine any significant number of South Koreans looking at North Korea and thinking ooooh yes that is what I want.

Not that this justifies any of the recent coup, but actual communist conspiracies were still happening in recent memory.

"...former president Park Geun-hye was secretly a religious cult member."

which is shorter and clearer.

Pretty much every "Western" election voted out the incumbent due to their either poor economy or poor messaging about the economy. The swing-PA voter didn't vote out Biden because their daughter was dominating trans-kids in sports; they want grocery prices down.

That's generally the first defense of innocent people, too.

> While the South Korean government claimed 165 people were killed in the massacre, scholarship on the massacre today estimates 600 to 2,300 victims.

Just for the sake of it, compared it to the widely known chinese tiananmen square massacre, albeit this one has widely varying figures on wikipedia:

> The Chinese Red Cross had given a figure of 2,600 deaths but later denied having given such a figure.[16][17] The Swiss Ambassador had estimated 2,700. Beijing hospital records compiled shortly after the events recorded at least 478 dead and 920 wounded. ...etc

No one from that period is still in the exact same position as when it happened - some of them were promoted.

He arrived as an idealistic anti fascist fighter. After experiencing Stalinism in person, he became the man we know.

https://www.realinstitutoelcano.org/en/commentaries/how-spai...

None of the storyline actually takes place in 'Eurasia' or 'Eastasia' or any other part of the world. They don't need to even actually exist for the storyline. Indeed, this itself is a message about controlling a populace via control of information. The rest of the world could have been razed by war, they could be total utopias. The propaganda keeps people from thinking about alternatives.

Pretty much everyone.

Only difference in which enemy is pointed to, is who you ask.

The USA without cheap Chinese manufacturing is basically dead in the water. It is approximately unfathomable how much of the comfortable and cheap way of life enjoyed in the US is directly dependent on trade with China and mindbendingly cheap Chinese manufacturing labor.

The ~most valuable company in the country is 100% beholden to Chinese manufacturing to make the most popular product that makes all of their money. They are doing their best to replicate manufacturing capacity in India but you can’t make 50,000 iPhones an hour without years of build-up and thousands upon thousands of trained staff.

If China invades Taiwan, the USG is basically game theoretically forced to make Americans endure some significant hardships until a new metastability is achieved.

Good "return on propaganda investment" for those guys.

Smedley Butler told us how this was all gonna work a long time ago.

That said, China has stated that their long-term plan is to overtake our military, economic, and technological dominance.

That's, at the very least, a clear signal that they want to beat us.

I don't see it as rational, but there is definitely an argument that the USA ought to remain positioned as number one, having the ability to dictate global politics. I don't think we deserve it, but it's certainly 'better' for us in the sense that it gives us an advantage and thus might improve our quality of life (cheaper imports, blah blah blah). I view that argument as entitled and promoting the status quo.

The Chinese people have worked hard. Actually, people all over the world work hard, although the Chinese have gone past industrialization and have a massive and capable population. The idea that they wouldn't have more power and would need to somehow remain under the US's thumb, where we get to say how they treat Taiwan or what currency they can trade in with other countries, just seems absurd. People come up with bullshit reasons for why the US ought to retain some control over their politics or how the rest of the world engages with the Chinese (and we don't just get to do that anyway), e.g., the Chinese are mean to the Uyghurs, as if anyone ever gave a fuck about the Uyghurs or whoever twenty years ago.

In all that sense, China is certainly a real threat. But the level of entitlement behind that argument is so blatant that I can't take it seriously.

Remember that China is not a "free country" (even as much as Western nations have started to make a mockery of that word) like those of the US or Western Europe. Your experience is highly curated by default. If you're just a tourist or a businessman visiting Shenzhen or Shanghai, it's unlikely you'll have any problems - those are major international business cities!

  I just spent a month in China and the disparity between what we are told in western media and what is actually going on is substantial, but not in the ways I expected.

The vast majority of people on Hacker News have drank so much "China bad" propaganda that they're even afraid of visiting.