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On Wednesday, President Yoon Suk-yeol became the first sitting South Korean president to be arrested by criminal investigators over charges of insurrection arising from his ill-fated declaration of martial law last month. The arrest brought an end to a dramatic weekslong standoff between the investigators and Yoon’s presidential security guards, which gripped the nation with fears that a violent clash might occur on the hilltop presidential compound in Yongsan, Seoul. But the country still remains stranded in largely uncharted territory—and with many possible constitutional clashes ahead.
On Jan. 3, investigators and police officers were forced to abandon their first attempt to arrest Yoon when they were blocked by a “human wall” of 200 presidential security guards and soldiers standing arm in arm to guard the compound. After a tense six-hour standoff and a series of scuffles, the helplessly outnumbered investigators retreated. Yoon remained barricaded in his fortress, shielded by barbed wire, buses, and bodyguards, and a brigade of hard-line loyalists planted across his cabinet.
As dawn broke on Wednesday, investigators returned with 3,200 police officers carrying ladders and wire cutters, backed by warnings from prosecutors that Yoon’s security guards would be arrested if they blocked the officials a second time. Officers scaled bus barricades blocking the entrance, while others hiked up a mountain trail at the back of the residence. This time, Yoon’s security guards put up no visible resistance. Following hours of negotiations, Yoon struck a deal with massed law enforcement officials to accept arrest.
In a video message released shortly afterward, Yoon said he had decided to submit to questioning to prevent “unsavory bloodshed.” But he insisted that the investigation was still illegal and that the “rule of law had completely collapsed.”
South Korea has been stranded in the uncharted territory of detaining a sitting, if suspended, president, wrestling with an unprecedented power vacuum. Although Yoon was impeached by the National Assembly last month, he has not yet been removed from office, as his impeachment is still under review by the Constitutional Court. This meant that Yoon remains entitled to his security detail, which, paradoxically, is also answerable to the acting president, Choi Sang-mok.
When investigators called on Choi to rein in Yoon’s security team, Choi, Finance Minister and veteran economic technocrat who ascended the ranks of Yoon’s cabinet as an avowed conservative loyalist, turned a blind eye. Choi’s chief of staff argued, in a letter to the investigators, that the acting president lacked the authority to command the Presidential Security Service (PSS). Even as the second arrest attempt drew close, and opposition lawmakers cried out to stand down the PSS, Choi remained unwilling to wade into the standoff.
As the arrest unfolded on Wednesday, Choi took an ostensibly neutralist stance by warning both the sides against violence. “This is a very important moment for maintaining order and the rule of law in South Korea,” he said in a statement. “We cannot tolerate any violence between government agencies for any purposes because it will irreparably damage the trust of our people and our international reputation.”
Choi’s parochial vision for his provisional leadership is seeded in politics, not law. While the South Korean Constitution empowers the acting president to exercise the authority of the president, it does not delineate the contours of his powers and duties. This constitutional silence, paired with the makeshift nature of the office and its fragile democratic credentials, is conventionally interpreted to entrust the acting president with all the powers of the presidency, with a caveat—“as appropriate, to maintain the status quo,” guided by a keen attunement to the political crisis born of the presidential vacancy. At the same time, the acting president bears an affirmative duty to uphold the rule of law, which may require exercising powers that challenge the existing state of affairs, creating something of a constitutional limbo.
Even so, the authority to command the executive’s security service to comply with a lawful arrest warrant falls squarely within the acting president’s jurisdiction, if not at the forefront of his duty. “Entrusted with all the powers of the presidency, the acting president inarguably has the authority to command the Presidential Security Service,” Kim Seon-taek, a constitutional scholar at Korea University School of Law, told South Korean daily Hankyoreh. “Choi’s refusal to command the Presidential Security Service is driven by political considerations, not by the law.”
As an unelected interim commander without a clear constitutional playbook to follow, Choi is in limbo. His powers are governed not by the constitution but by an embattled standoff between his domestic political agenda, partisan politics, and his lack of a popular mandate. “The inability or refusal of acting President Choi to call on the PSS to stand down is overdetermined [by] his own political inclinations, pressure from his party, pressure on the street, and a sense that the acting president’s mandate is limited by a reduced legitimacy to make grand decisions and gestures,” said Mason Richey, a political scientist at Hankuk University of Foreign Studies.
Choi’s democratic legitimacy is further weakened by the fact that he is the second acting president to take the helm after Prime Minister Han Duck-soo, who was impeached by opposition lawmakers after he refused to make the judicial appointments required for the Constitutional Court to review Yoon’s impeachment case.
But even if Choi had assumed the mantle of commander in chief, Yoon’s impromptu militia might not have heeded his command. “Although Yoon has been impeached by the National Assembly, he is undeniably the sitting president elected by the people and is receiving the corresponding security measures prescribed by law,” Park Jong-jun, the chief of the PSS and a longtime conservative stalwart who also served as deputy chief of conservative President Park Geun-hye’s security service, said in a televised address following the first arrest attempt. He defended his decision to fight against Yoon’s arrest warrant—which he called “mired in controversies over its legality”—as an allegiance to his duty to protect the president. “If my judgment on the matter is wrong, I am willing to bear any legal consequences,” he added. Park, charged with obstruction of justice, has since resigned from his post.
This marked the first time that a security chief had addressed the nation since South Korea’s dark age of military dictatorship. Park faces accusations of conspiring in Yoon’s failed self-coup, along with former Defense Minister Kim Yong-hyun, a longtime confidant of Yoon who led Yoon’s security services before being promoted to spearhead his martial law decree.
As security chief, Kim turned the agency into an army of acolytes poised to stand in Yoon’s last line of defense by hiring hard-line conservative loyalists with close personal connections to Yoon and his wife. In 2022, Kim controversially sought to militarize the agency with an amendment to the Presidential Security Service Act, which would grant the security chief the authority to command the military and police. After drawing fierce criticisms that the move was reminiscent of President Park Chung-hee’s authoritarian regime, the amendment was eventually repealed to authorize the security chief to “cooperate with the heads of relevant agencies.”
The PSS prides itself in “securing the president’s absolute safety as the reason for its existence and sacred duty.” Created in 1963 under Park Chung-hee, who rose to power by staging a coup against a democratically elected government, the agency is a relic of authoritarian rule. Park’s security chief, Park Jong-kyu, was nicknamed “Pistol Park” for brandishing his gun at anyone who got in President Park’s way. Park’s next security chief, Cha Ji-cheol, emerged as a powerful “second-in-command” wielding unchecked—and unconstitutional—authority over state affairs. During the Busan-Masan democratic uprisings, Cha infamously urged Park to crush the protestors with tanks and deployed air forces.
The security agency swelled into a militia that continued its legacy of violence under Park’s autocratic successor, President Chun Doo-hwan, who seized power after Park’s assassination in 1979. Chun’s security chief, Jang Se-dong, was a chief architect of Chun’s coup and co-conspirator of the massacre of thousands of protesters during the Gwangju uprising.
Since South Korea’s democratization in 1987, the PSS has waned in power, earning the nickname “shadow security” under a string of democratic presidents attuned to the echoes of its troubled history. When President Park Geun-hye, daughter of Park Chung-hee, took office, the agency’s power was revived, harking back to its authoritarian legacy.
But after revelations arose that the agency aided and abetted Park’s collusions with a shaman-like advisor—a sprawling corruption saga that ended in Park’s impeachment—her liberal successor, President Moon Jae-in, pledged to dismantle the agency and create an independent presidential security bureau under the police department. Lawmakers introduced bills to disband the agency, distraught by the remnants of political collusion between the agency and the president.
Following in the footsteps of his predecessors, Yoon’s security chief thrust himself into the president’s last line of defense. Shadows of the bizarre, twisted camaraderie between presidents and security chiefs—and their schemes of autocracy—still loom over the young democracy.
To end the legacy of militarized security forces, opposition lawmakers are pushing bills to disband the PSS and instead establish an independent presidential security bureau under the National Police Agency, which operates within the Ministry of the Interior and Safety. “As Yoon’s Presidential Security Service is dismantling the constitution and the laws and positioning itself as a private militia for insurrection, it no longer has a reason to exist,” said Park Chan-dae, floor leader of the Democratic Party.
In most of South Korea’s democratic allies, security organizations for heads of state operate as autonomous agencies under the police department, shielded from unchecked executive command. “Such structures allow the agency to be checked by the law and by other governmental powers. They prevent abuses of power,” said Han Seung-whoon, a professor of police administration at Dongshin University. “A security organization structured as an agency directly under the president takes on the characteristics of a private militia, which is seen only in underdeveloped or authoritarian regimes.”
With an impeached president clinging to power, security guards pledging allegiance, and an acting president sitting on the sidelines, the process of Yoon’s arrest only narrowly escaped descending into bloodshed on the hills of Yongsan. South Korea is going to emerge from this even more politically polarized and fractured than it was before, which is going to have some continuing long-term consequences on the stability of governance,” Richey said. Once again, South Korea faces a timeless challenge: to build a constitutional system resilient to autocracy, shielded from any collusions between presidents and security chiefs, or the complacency of an acting president.
In the book People Who Go to Work at the Blue House, published by the National Museum of Korean Contemporary History, Lee Seong-woo, a presidential security officer who guarded six South Korean presidents from 1987 to 2012, writes, “It’s important to remember that a presidential security officer guards the president as a public figure, not the president as a person. Never forget that.” It’s time for South Korea to build a new line of defense against autocracy.