A broadcast covering the Supreme Court's final sentencing in the case of former President Yoon Suk Yeol on charges including obstruction of arrest airs live at Seoul Station on July 9. [Yonhap]
A broadcast covering the Supreme Court's final sentencing in the case of former President Yoon Suk Yeol on charges including obstruction of arrest airs live at Seoul Station on July 9. [Yonhap]

The camp of former President Yoon Suk Yeol said it will not file a constitutional complaint against the Supreme Court ruling that finalized his seven-year prison sentence on charges including obstruction of arrest.

Yoon's spokesperson team announced Monday that while the former president "sympathizes with the view that there are no small number of points difficult to accept in this Supreme Court ruling," he had made clear that filing a so-called "trial complaint" — a constitutional complaint targeting a final court ruling — "is difficult to reconcile with the judicial authority structure envisioned by the current Constitution of the Republic of Korea, and does not accord with his consistent constitutional philosophy."

The spokesperson team criticized the Supreme Court, saying it "abandoned legal reasoning on core legal issues and dismissed the appeal by relegating most matters to the domain of factual findings and free evaluation of evidence," adding that "the legal and constitutional questions left by this ruling are by no means trivial, in that the court failed to fulfill its duty as the highest court to set interpretive standards for the Constitution and statutes and to ensure consistency in precedent and legal stability."

The team said that "based on this awareness of the problem, various constitutional adjudication procedures, including a trial complaint, were reviewed," and noted that "particularly given the impact of this ruling on the people's right to a fair trial and the rule of law, considerable opinion was raised internally that constitutional review should be sought again."

The team went on to say it "shares former President Yoon's constitutional judgment that the constitutional order must be respected not only in its substantive values but also in the allocation of authority and procedural limits through which it is realized," adding that "this decision reflects the principled judgment that respecting the structure of judicial authority and the distribution of powers among institutions as set forth by the current Constitution is the path to upholding the rule of law, regardless of the advantages or disadvantages in any individual case — and accordingly, the final decision has been made not to file a trial complaint."

Earlier, the Supreme Court's Third Division, presided over by Justice Lee Suk-yeon, upheld on July 9 the lower court's sentence of seven years in prison for Yoon on charges including obstruction of special public duty and abuse of authority to interfere with the exercise of rights.

The court dismissed appeals from both Yoon's side and the insurrection special prosecutor team led by Special Prosecutor Jo Eun-seok, ruling that "the lower court's judgment did not violate the rules of logic and experience so as to exceed the limits of free evaluation of evidence, nor did it err in its legal interpretation regarding the elements of the crimes."

Yoon had been charged with mobilizing the Presidential Security Service in January last year to block the Corruption Investigation Office for High-ranking Officials from executing an arrest warrant against him, in connection with the investigation into the emergency martial law crisis.

Yoon's defense team, in a statement issued immediately after the Supreme Court ruling on July 9, expressed "deep regret that the highest court closed such a significant case without sufficient deliberation, from the standpoint of the rule of law and the warrant requirement that form the foundation of the Constitution of the Republic of Korea," and raised the possibility of filing a constitutional complaint.

The defense team said it "plans to contest the unconstitutionality of this ruling through constitutional adjudication procedures including a trial complaint, in order to protect the fundamental rights guaranteed by the Constitution, and will carry out all procedures faithfully and responsibly within the bounds prescribed by law and the Constitution."


yg@heraldcorp.com