South Korea, whose constitutional system has “semi-presidential” characteristics (two-headed executive with a president elected by direct universal suffrage and a prime minister appointed by him with the confidence of the Assembly), recently gave a lesson in democracy from which France should urgently draw inspiration. The use of full powers, decided at 10:30 p.m. by the President of South Korea, Yoon Suk-yeol, on the night of December 3 to 4, under article 77 of the South Korean Constitution, has been lifted by the National Assembly in a majority vote occurring barely a few hours later, while the army, which was trying to block access to Parliament, found itself prevented by thousands of demonstrators who spontaneously took to the streets in a amazing democratic surge. React quickly Ten days later, the president was dismissed by a vote of parliamentarians, with a qualified majority of two-thirds, including by deputies from his own party. If this impeachment must still be confirmed by the Constitutional Court, Yoon is also facing criminal charges, and everything suggests that he will be sentenced to a very heavy prison sentence, or even the death penalty, for his attempted coup d’état. . One of her predecessors, Park Geun-hye, was sentenced to twenty-two years in prison after her impeachment, in this case for corruption. If this attempted coup d’état, permitted by the inclusion of martial law in the Constitution, was thus able to be defeated, it is because the text in question, allowing a temporary dictatorship, nevertheless gives the Assembly the means of opposing it without delay. It is more safeguards than our article 16, which offers the president a discretionary power both to declare a state of exception but also to put an end to it, without any authority being provided by the texts with means to oppose it – neither the National Assembly nor even the Constitutional Council, since only the possibility of an “opinion” (and not a decision) from the Council is provided, optional after thirty days, obligatory after sixty days. However, as the South Koreans have well understood, when it comes to a coup d’état, you have to react very quickly: everything is decided in the first hours. You have 63.92% of this article left to read. The rest is reserved for subscribers.
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