105 South Koreans sue former president for ‘emotional damages'
His short-lived declaration of martial law on Dec. 3 first landed him in front of the Constitutional Court - which removed him from office later that month - and then in the Seoul Central District Court, where he is now being tried on charges of insurrection.
There is also the group of 105 irate citizens suing Yoon for emotional damages related to his power grab, which sent special forces soldiers to occupy the National Assembly and brought the press briefly under military control.
Filed shortly after South Korean lawmakers voted to overrule Yoon's martial law order last year, the lawsuit is demanding compensation of 100,000 won ($73) for each of its plaintiffs. The first hearing is due later this month.
"The defendant's declaration of emergency martial law and the actions that followed were unlawful, violating the plaintiffs' basic rights as South Korean citizens such as the freedom to one's life and body and the guarantee of human dignity, in addition to inflicting mental harm such as fear, anxiety, discomfort and shame," the complaint said.
Behind those words is Lee Gum-gyu, a 52-year-old attorney who specializes in urban development law, but has become nationally known for facing down presidents in their impeachment trials.
The first was conservative president Park Geun-hye, whom Lee, as a member of the legislature's legal team, helped oust in 2016 following a major graft scandal.
The second - and the only other South Korean leader to be removed from office - was Yoon.
As a member of the National Assembly's legal team in the Constitutional Court trial that confirmed Yoon's impeachment, Lee used his closing argument to speak of the fear he felt for his son, who was a conscript in the military.
"The fact of emergency martial law itself filled me with fear, but the thought that my son might be deployed to enforce it was even more horrifying," he said.
The civil suit, he says, is largely symbolic - one final rebuke of Yoon. It is why Lee gathered exactly 105 plaintiffs: the number of pro-Yoon legislators who boycotted his impeachment.
And the asking sum of 100,000 won ($73) each?
"I thought about keeping it at 10,000 won ($7.30), but that seemed like too little. My pride wouldn't let me," Lee said.
"Obviously there isn't a formula for something like this, but 100,000 won just seemed more appropriate."
The success rate of emotional damages claims against former presidents is not high.
The closest example is a series of similar suits filed by South Korean citizens against Park in 2016. They sought 500,000 won ($364) per plaintiff.
But the Supreme Court dismissed those claims in 2020, saying that "even if there were South Korean citizens who felt emotions like anger due to the defendant's actions, it cannot be said that this constituted a level of mental distress that necessitates compensation for every citizen."
Still, Lee figures that his suit against Yoon has at least a marginally higher chance of success, given the far graver offense at hand.
"The case against Park was related to corruption - it wasn't a case of the president unconstitutionally infringing on people's basic rights," he said. "The martial law forces actually went to the National Assembly and pointed their rifles at legislators and their staff. I do think that people's right to life was directly threatened."
Some legal experts agree.
"I am also curious whether this will work or not," said a judge in Seoul who requested anonymity to comment on an ongoing case. "Under current jurisprudence, I don't think it's entirely impossible."
Given South Korea's history with authoritarianism, Lee argues, the claim to emotional distress isn't just courtroom theater. South Koreans lived under a dictatorship as recently as the 1980s. Political repression and violence are still part of the country's memory.
The last declaration of martial law was made in May 1980 by the Chun Doo-hwan military junta, which sent special forces units to violently quash pro-democracy protests in the city of Gwangju. More than 160 civilians were killed, many of them gunned down by soldiers in the streets.
Lee, who is from Gwangju, remembers watching a tank roll down the street behind his house as a child.
"The national trauma from those events led to a real and deep fear in many South Koreans," he said.
Han Ki-chang, a real estate agent and one of the 105 plaintiffs, says that he suffered from "martial law insomnia."
The term entered the popular vernacular in the last few months and has been covered by the national media as an anecdotal phenomenon, with some older South Koreans saying it stirred panicked memories of living under authoritarian rule.
"It was real. I had trouble sleeping in January and February," Han said. "And I could tell I wasn't the only one. Whenever I'd message people or post in a group chat in the middle of the night, a lot of people would respond, saying they needed to sleep but couldn't."
At least one other group is preparing their own emotional damages lawsuit against the former president.
Lee, the attorney, expects that there will be even more suits because he has been sending out copies of his complaint to anyone who wants it. They can just fill in their names and file their own.
"If we win this case, that might make it possible for all 52 million South Korean citizens to claim damages," he said.
He quickly did the math: at $7.30 per person, a total of $380 million.
Copyright (C) 2025, Tribune Content Agency, LLC. Portions copyrighted by the respective providers.
Hashtags
Try Our AI Features
Explore what Daily8 AI can do for you:
Comments
No comments yet...
Related Articles
Boston Globe
17 hours ago
- Boston Globe
They vanished in Syria's long occupation of Lebanon. Now their families want answers.
President Bashar Assad of Syria had just been toppled by a lightning rebel offensive. In the chaos, a news crew filming outside a Syrian prison captured the image of an older man, disheveled and dazed, emerging from its gates. The family froze. They were sure it was the missing son, Ali, and their story quickly made headlines. Advertisement But days passed. Then weeks. Ali never returned. Hope faded. Lebanese officials offered no answers. Journalists stopped calling. Months later, the search grinds on. 'We need to continue my mother's mission,' said Ali's brother Moammar, clutching an old photograph of him in the family's home in northern Lebanon. 'We still have hope he is alive.' After the collapse of the Assad government, prison doors across the country flew open, and Syrians flooded in to search for traces of their friends and loved ones who had disappeared in untold numbers under the brutal regime. In Lebanon, however, many could only watch and wait. Thousands of Lebanese had gone missing during Syria's decades-long occupation of their country, which lasted from 1976 to 2005, and many were believed to be imprisoned in Syria. For years, the tentacles of Assad's security state extended well beyond Syria's borders, ensnaring not only political opponents, but also ordinary civilians caught up in its machinery of suspicion. Dissidents, laborers, businesspeople — anyone could vanish. Advertisement The disappearances became a hallmark of Syria's rule, sometimes aided by pro-Syrian Lebanese factions, with men and women taken from their homes or snatched off streets. Behind the checkpoints, Damascus' secret police, known as the mukhabarat, ran detention sites across Lebanon — Beirut's luxury Beau Rivage Hotel became shorthand for torture — and routinely transported suspects across the border to prisons like Sednaya. When Assad was toppled, Lebanese officials estimated that more than 700 of their citizens were still imprisoned in Syria, but some advocacy groups say there are far more unaccounted for. So far, only nine have returned, many after languishing in prison for decades. Among them was Suheil Hamawi, who was taken from his home more than three decades ago. Standing on his balcony overlooking the Mediterranean, Hamawi, 61, took a drag from his cigarette and gazed at the crystal clear waters below. It was a lot to take in: He had not seen the sea in 33 years. 'These scenes — you can only repeat them in your mind, and in your dreams,' Hamawi said. 'I feel like I can breathe again.' A member of a Lebanese Christian political party opposed to the Syrian occupation, Hamawi was abducted from his family home in 1992 by Syrian intelligence officers and taken across the border. His capture was so abrupt that for the first 17 years, his wife believed he had simply vanished. His son, Georges, was only 10 months old at the time. When Hamawi returned home, Georges was 33 and had a son of his own. Advertisement Hamawi spent the days and weeks after his release sipping cups of cardamom-infused coffee and video-calling relatives, many of their faces now unrecognizable to him. 'Do you remember my children?' said a cousin over the phone, sitting alongside her adult daughter. 'When I left her, she was so small,' Hamawi said in disbelief. Former Lebanese prisoners interviewed by The New York Times described brutal treatment and torture, which they said was often more severe on account of their nationality. Families of those missing said they had received no help from Lebanese authorities while Assad was in power, and had often been forced to spend thousands of dollars on bribes to Syrian security forces to get a sign of life from their relatives or win their release. Bounced around the Assad regime's network of prisons, Hamawi was first detained in Palestine Branch in Damascus, and later in the notorious Sednaya. He spent the first five years in solitary confinement in a cell about 30 inches wide and 6 1/2 feet high. He described it as 'a tomb with a door.' 'There was no light at all,' he said. 'We used to recognize day from night by the sound of birds, or from the type of food they used to give us.' In Sednaya, Hamawi grew close with his cellmates. They had been stripped of their names and given numbers — his was 55 — but that did not stop them from forging quiet bonds. Most did not live to see the fall of the Assad regime, he said. Advertisement One Syrian friend, a journalist, disappeared after being told by guards that he had a visitor, only for Hamawi to find out 10 years later that he had been executed. Another close friend, Fahed, a fellow Lebanese, refused treatment after becoming seriously ill, preferring to die than endure another day. 'He was stronger than me,' Hamawi said. 'He accepted death, and I couldn't.' In recent months, Syria's new rulers established a commission to investigate the fates of those who disappeared as part of a broader push for transitional justice. In Lebanon, where Syria's shadow still looms, families of the missing have been fighting a parallel battle for decades, pressing for accountability and answers. But the Assad regime wielded outsize influence over Lebanon, refusing to shed light on the fate of the vanished, and Lebanese officials were often unable — or unwilling — to press the issue. For Abir Abou Zeki, whose father was among the disappeared, it has been a lifelong fight. It was June 12, 1987, when her father, Khalil, walked into her bedroom in a home just south of Beirut and planted a soft kiss on her cheek for the last time. The family of five was set to begin new lives in Germany. Their passports were ready. So were their plane tickets. But Khalil had to make one last business trip into Syria to collect spare truck parts for the company he worked for. When days went by and he did not return in time for their flight, panic set in. They eventually learned he had been arrested because he had a coffee tin containing American dollars, a criminal offense under the Assad regime. Advertisement Then he disappeared. In the months that followed, their family fell apart. Abou Zeki's mother, Dalal, walked out, unable to cope with the stress of raising three children alone. Their dreams of a new life had been shattered almost overnight. For years, members of Lebanon's Druze community, a close-knit religious minority to which the family belongs, rallied around the family. Relatives and local officials made repeated appeals to Syrian authorities. 'The only answer was: 'Yes, he is in our prisons. Consider him ours and don't ask about him anymore,'' Abou Zeki said. Years later, the message hardened: 'Consider him dead,' she recalled. When Assad was toppled in December, Abou Zeki, like so many others, allowed herself a flicker of hope — though it came tangled with guilt and fear. 'I think it's selfish of me to say that I want him to be alive after all that torture,' she said. 'But we suffered a lot. We used to feel guilty if we were eating or drinking -- because he wasn't able to. We felt warm while he was cold.' 'I think it's easier to know that he died,' she said quietly. Others are hoping wholeheartedly. In the Ali family's crumbling home in northern Lebanon, Moammar clutched the portrait of his brother Ali, taken when he was still a young man. As their mother once did, he was saving up for a trip across the border, hoping to find answers. From the window, Syria was visible in the distance. Somewhere out there, they still believed, Ali is alive, waiting to be found. 'A mother's feeling is never wrong,' Moammar said. This article originally appeared in Advertisement
New York Post
a day ago
- New York Post
NYC Garden of Hate: Officials negotiating with community garden over ‘Poppies for Palestine'
The city has backed off a bid to oust an anti-Israel community garden in Queens, and is negotiating a compromise instead — a deal critics suspect was likley made to appease a future Zohran Mamdani mayoral administration. City attorneys on Thursday told Judge Hasa Kingo any agreement with the management at Sunset Community Garden in Ridgewood would require vast changes to the unconstitutional wording of the group's 10 'community agreements' — which forced incoming members to pledge 'solidarity with the oppressed and marginalized people' of Palestine. A special section of the green space was labeled 'Poppies for Palestine.' Advertisement 8 Controversy has swirled around the Ridgewood green space since The Post's first report last fall. Helayne Seidman 8 The garden is home to a pair of 'altars' honoring Latina trans advocate Cecilia Gentili. Helayne Seidman 8 A sign just inside the garden's entrance reads, 'Hands Off Sunset.' Helayne Seidman Advertisement Critics were aghast at the city compromising with haters. 'If you break the law and discriminate against minorities and the marginalized, as long as you only discriminate against Jews and people who defend Jews, it's OK,' said Ridgewood resident Sara Schraeter-Mowersglad, who called the ongoing negotiations between the city and the garden 'a very dangerous precedent.' Christina Wilkinson, who opposes the garden's woke agenda, said city workers told her 'they think Mamdani will win in November and they don't want to deal with this with him in charge and are in fear for their jobs.' Mamdani, a Queens assemblyman and socialist Democratic mayoral frontrunner, has been staunchly pro-Palestine. Advertisement 8 A special section of the garden for Palestine. Instagram @sunsetgardenridgewood 8 A social media post from a garden member claims 'cis' people have no understanding of community. Helayne Seidman The Parks Department had been pushing for new management at the garden, located at Onderdonk and Willoughby avenues, and revoked their license in May. Parks officials wanted the group to vacate the green space by June 6 for 'violat[ing] the terms of their license' with their 'ideological litmus test and the installation of an altar without prior Parks Department approval,' according to court documents. Advertisement But the matter wound up in court last month. City attorney Blake Ahlberg told Kingo the Corporation Counsel's office needed more time to deliberate and discuss the compromise, due to the 'high-profile' nature of the case. Kingo opined that the language in the community agreements violated both the New York and U.S. constitutions. 'Compelled speech isn't free speech,' he said. 8 Attorney Jonathan Wallace, right, leaves court Thursday with one of the garden's members, Aphroditus. Michael Nagle 8 Wallace spoke with Corporation Counsel Leslie Spitalnick (in white) and attorney Blake Ahlberg (pictured behind her.) Michael Nagle Kingo said he would drop the case if both sides failed to reach a compromise by the next court hearing on Aug. 1. The garden's critics, like Wilkinson, also told The Post any deal with the pro-Palestinian group would undermine the Park Department's authority. Advertisement 8 The message is clear. Helayne Seidman 'If [the garden's leaders] are left in charge, it's only a matter of time before they violate their license again, and now [the Parks Department] has no teeth, because the city attorneys have indicated that they have no intention of backing them up,' Wilkinson said. In June, garden organizer Laura Merrick renamed Sunset Community Garden to Jardin de Santa Cecilia in honor of Latina trans advocate Cecilia Gentili. The space is now home to a pair of 'altars' honoring Gentili. Both Merrick and the Parks Department refused to respond to requests for comment.
a day ago
South Korea's ousted President Yoon indicted on additional criminal charges over martial law
SEOUL, South Korea -- South Korea's ousted conservative President Yoon Suk Yeol was indicted Saturday on additional criminal charges related to his ill-fated imposition of martial law, about three months after he was formally thrown out of office. Yoon's additional indictments mean he will remain in jail for up to six months as he faces a trial at the Seoul Central District Court on his Dec. 3 martial law declaration that plunged South Korea into huge political turmoil. Yoon was sent back to prison last week after the Seoul court approved his arrest warrant requested by a team of investigators headed by independent counsel Cho Eun-suk. Cho's team indicted Yoon on abuse of power that obstructed the rights of some of his Cabinet members. The charge was imposed because Yoon summoned only select Cabinet members to approve his emergency martial law when South Korean law requires approval of all Cabinet members for such a measure, Park Ji-young, a senior investigator at Cho's team, told a briefing. Park said Yoon was also charged with fabricating an official document in an attempt to satisfy a formal requirement for a martial law declaration before he eventually destroyed it. After declaring martial law, Yoon sent troops and police officers to the opposition-controlled National Assembly, but enough lawmakers managed to enter an assembly chamber and voted down his decree, forcing his Cabinet to lift it. Yoon was later impeached by the assembly, with some of his ruling party lawmakers voting to suspend his presidential powers. Yoon has argued his decree was a desperate attempt to draw public support of his fight against the 'wickedness' of the main liberal opposition Democratic Party, which had obstructed his agenda, impeached top officials and slashed the government's budget bill. He earlier called the National Assembly 'a den of criminals' and 'anti-state forces.' In January, state prosecutors arrested and indicted him on rebellion, a grave charge that would incur the death penalty or life imprisonment if convicted. In March, however, Yoon was released from prison after a judge at the Seoul district court canceled his arrest to allow him to stand trial without being held in custody. In April, the Constitutional Court formally dismissed Yoon as president, prompting a snap election to choose his successor. After winning that election, new President Lee Jae Myung, a former Democratic Party leader, approved legislation to launch independent investigations to uncover fuller details of Yoon's martial law stunt and delve into other criminal allegations involving his wife and administration. Lee named Cho an independent counsel to lead an investigation on Yoon's martial law decree. In May, state prosecutors indicted Yoon on charges of abusing power and forcing soldiers and police officers to try to seal the assembly and election offices, acts that are not part of their duties.
