It wasn’t the calendar that made me realize a year had passed. Someone brought up that night in conversation, and I noticed I was already hearing it as something distant.
Yet I remembered the operative clause of the Constitutional Court’s ruling. The respondent, President Yoon Suk-yeol, is hereby removed from office. Perhaps that is why I opened the ruling again—to see what had come before that sentence. At first, I watched it on the news. Waiting for the operative clause at the end, I didn’t truly hear what preceded it.
“The fact that the National Assembly was able to promptly pass a resolution demanding the lifting of martial law was due to the resistance of citizens and the passive execution of duties by the military and police; therefore, this does not affect the determination of the gravity of the respondent’s violation of the law.”
The Court used this as grounds for its finding of unconstitutionality. But reading this sentence slowly, one gets the feeling that, apart from the legal judgment, something else is recorded here. That the lifting of martial law was not thanks to institutions. That on that night, institutions alone were not enough. The Court is confirming this as a fact.
That confession sits quietly inside the ruling.
The very fact that martial law could be declared was already a signal.
The Constitution contains articles on martial law, requirements, and procedures. However, the fact that those articles could actually be mobilized in this situation—that the President perceived them as a means to resolve a political confrontation with the National Assembly—cannot be explained simply as one person making a bad choice. In the seat where that choice was possible, a certain sense of the limits of power had never been properly internalized.
The Court has already answered for that judgment. It is the next question where I linger longer. A certain terrain revealed by the fact that such a choice was possible. Does that terrain belong to one person alone?
After the removal from office was finalized, many people said it. That democracy worked. That is not wrong.
The members of the National Assembly entering the main chamber and passing the resolution to lift martial law that night was an institutional procedure. The authority granted by the Constitution was actually exercised. The Constitutional Court decided on the removal from office by a unanimous vote. The institutions worked.
But when you look at the conditions that made that procedure possible, the story changes. The reason the legislators could enter the chamber was that citizens were physically blocking the soldiers’ entry. Had that physical space not been secured, the institutional procedure itself might not have materialized.
It is true that institutions worked. But institutions did not create the conditions for their own operation. The Constitution did not defend itself that night. The citizens who climbed the walls, and the soldiers who responded passively to their orders, defended it.
The law does not defend itself. Will there be people to climb the wall next time?
In the year since the removal from office, a healing discourse has been repeated. That we must heal the division. However, this phrase was almost always used with something bracketed off—a refusal to ask where it came from.
What state does healing return us to? The state prior to the declaration of martial law? But wasn’t that state what made martial law possible in the first place? Is there even a place to return to?
Perhaps the persistence of conflict is not a failure of healing, but a signal that there is something no one has yet truly looked into. The removal from office was a decision handed down to one person. No decision has yet been made regarding the things that put him in that seat.