It was not when I looked at the calendar that I realized a year had passed. It was during a conversation, when someone brought up the events of that night, and I realized I was listening to it as if it were something from a distant past.
Yet I still remembered the disposition 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—because I wanted to see what had come before that sentence. At first, I had watched it on the news. Waiting for the disposition that would come at the very end, I didn’t properly hear the things that preceded it.
“Because the National Assembly was able to quickly pass the resolution demanding the lifting of martial law owing to the resistance of citizens and the passive conduct of soldiers and police, 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 if you read this sentence slowly, you get the feeling that, apart from the legal judgment, something else is recorded here. That the lifting of martial law was not thanks to the institutions. That on that night, the institutions alone were not enough. The court is confirming this as a fact.
That confession sits quietly inside the ruling.
Invisible Layers
The reason that sentence stayed in my head must be because it was touching something beyond a legal judgment.
We sense, if dimly, that there are two layers to democracy.
One is the layer of visible things. Elections, the legislature, the Constitutional Court, the separation of powers. Devices designed to divide, limit, and check power. But for these devices to actually function, something else—something invisible—must exist first. The fact that the actors have internalized the rules, that the person in power accepts defeat, that everyone actually believes the law applies to them as well. Institutions function only upon that belief. Where belief has collapsed, the institution becomes a shell.
What the night of December 3, 2024 showed was exactly that. When the president declared martial law and ordered the military to be mobilized to blockade the National Assembly, it was not a constitutional provision that blocked that order. The Constitution could not defend itself that night. It was blocked by the citizens who climbed over the fence, and by the soldiers who responded passively to their orders.
This is a story of democracy’s victory. But at the same time, if we are to call it a victory, it is a story that requires those people to have been there that night.
A Matter of Terrain
The very fact that martial law could be declared was already a signal.
The Constitution does indeed contain provisions regarding martial law; there are requirements, and there are procedures. But the fact that those provisions could actually be mobilized in this situation, that the president perceived them as a means to resolve a political confrontation with the National Assembly—this cannot be explained simply as one person making a bad choice. Before that, there is the fact that a certain sense of the limits of power had never been properly internalized.
I am not trying to talk about Yoon Suk-yeol’s individual morality or judgment here. The court has already answered that. What I find myself dwelling on longer is the next question. A certain terrain revealed by the fact that such a choice was possible. And is that terrain his alone?
The Conditions of Functioning
After the removal from office was finalized, many people said: democracy functioned. They weren’t wrong.
The fact that the members of the National Assembly entered the main chamber and passed the resolution to lift the declaration was an institutional procedure. The authority granted by the Constitution was actually exercised. The Constitutional Court decided on the removal from office unanimously. The institutions functioned.
But when you look into the conditions that made that procedure possible, the story changes slightly. The reason the lawmakers were able to enter the chamber was that citizens were physically blocking the soldiers from entering. If that physical space had not been secured, the institutional procedure itself might not have been established. It is true that the institutions functioned. But the institutions could not create the conditions of their own functioning.
The law does not defend itself. If that is true, will there be people to climb over the fence next time? And if we cannot take that for granted, what are the institutions doing now?
Things Not Yet Ruled On
In the year since the removal, the discourse of healing has been repeated. That the division is not being healed. However, this word was almost always used with something bracketed off—a refusal to ask where it came from.
What state is healing supposed to return us to? The state before the declaration of martial law? But wasn’t it that very state that made martial law possible? Is there even a place to return to?
Perhaps the fact that the conflict persists is not a failure of healing, but a signal that there is something no one has yet properly looked into. The removal was a decision handed down to one person. Regarding the things that put him in that seat—the vacuum of trust in institutions, the absence of a culture of accepting defeat, a sensibility that has not internalized the limits of power—no decision has yet been made. Those things do not disappear with a removal from office.
That one line left by the court keeps turning over in my mind.
It was owing to the resistance of citizens.
This is praise, but at the same time, it is a confession. That our institutions alone were not enough. And that confession sits quietly inside the ruling.
The respondent, President Yoon Suk-yeol, is hereby removed from office.
The questions that remain, after that, are still waiting for their ruling.