South Korea’s Constitutional Court has held its first hearing to decide if suspended President Yoon Suk Yeol should be removed from office after his shock martial law attempt last month.
The hearing ended within four minutes because of Yoon’s absence – his lawyers had earlier said he would not attend for his own safety, as there is a warrant out for his arrest on separate charges of insurrection.
In December, Yoon was suspended after members of his own party voted with the opposition to impeach him.
However he will only be formally removed from office if at least six of the eight-member Constitutional Court bench votes to uphold the impeachment.
According to South Korean law, the court must set a new date for a hearing before they can proceed without his participation.
The next hearing is scheduled for Thursday.
Yoon’s lawyers have indicated that he will show up for a hearing at an “appropriate time”, but they have challenged the court’s “unilateral decision” on trial dates.
The court on Tuesday rejected the lawyers’ request for one of the eight justices to be recused from the proceedings.
Yoon has not commented publicly since parliament voted to impeach him on 14 December and has been speaking primarily through his lawyers.
Investigators are also separately preparing for another attempt to arrest Yoon for alleged insurrection, after an earlier attempt on 3 January ended following an hours-long standoff with his security team.
Yoon is South Korea’s first sitting president to face arrest. The second attempt to take him into custody could happen as early as this week, according to local media.
The suspended leader has not commented publicly since parliament voted to impeach him on 14 December and has been speaking primarily through his lawyers.
Yoon’s short-lived martial law declaration on 3 December has thrown South Korea into political turmoil. He had tried to justify the attempt by saying he was protecting the country from “anti-state” forces, but it soon became clear it was spurred by his own political troubles.
What followed was an unprecedented few weeks which saw the opposition-dominated parliament vote to impeach Yoon and then Prime Minister Han Duck-soo, who succeeded him briefly as acting president.
The crisis has hit the country’s economy, with the won weakening and global credit rating agencies warning of weakening consumer and business sentiment.
Former presidents Roh Moo-hyun and Park Geun-hye did not attend their impeachment trials in 2004 and 2017 respectively.
In Park’s case, the first hearing ended after nine minutes in her absence.
Roh was reinstated after a two-month review, while Park’s impeachment was upheld.

A flurry of Senate confirmation hearings for Trump’s Cabinet picks, beginning Tuesday, will exemplify the president-elect’s aggressive efforts to wield swift and consequential power after taking the oath of office on January 20. Trump will also make fresh efforts this week to nail down the strategy to push his sweeping agenda of disruption through the narrowly divided House and Senate before he launches a weekend of celebrations ahead of the inauguration.

Biden, 82, will deliver his farewell speech from the Oval Office on Wednesday in his first such address since he told Americans he wouldn’t run for reelection in July after a disastrous debate laid bare his diminished capacity. The outgoing administration is still hoping for a deal that would free US and Israeli hostages in Gaza, and Biden is also pushing the Taliban for the release of three Americans the US considers unjustly held in Afghanistan.

The president is also still considering whether to grant preemptive pardons to people whom the White House believes may be targets of the next president’s retribution, such as former Wyoming Rep. Liz Cheney, one of the president-elect’s most prominent GOP critics. Biden said Friday he was watching Trump’s rhetoric to try to assess his intentions, at a time when the departing president is using his appearances to try to fashion last-minute adjustments to how he will be remembered in history.

An already tense transition, given the brittle personal relationship between Trump and Biden, will be further overshadowed by the disastrous wildfires that have destroyed thousands of homes in the Los Angeles area and killed at least 24 people

When the sun falls from the darkening Washington, DC, sky, the electric crowd at Howard University appears certain it will rise brighter. Singing, cheering, linking arms and raising hands in the great outdoor quadrangle known as The Yard, they have come by the thousands to watch the election returns and witness history in a place where it has been made before.

The historically Black university has produced legendary authors and actors, esteemed scientists, the titanic Supreme Court Justice Thurgood Marshall, and the groundbreaking woman for whom the rapturous throngs have rallied tonight.

“And every time we hear a mention of Kamala Harris winning another state this crowd goes crazy!” a local television reporter says to her camera.

Academically, every soul here knows the vice president could lose. But in the way of true believers in every political campaign, they feel she is destined to win; that the polls will clang shut east to west and acclaim will echo back from the far ocean, across the Rockies and Plains, through the farms and industrial towns to the nation’s capital, where their candidate will become the first woman elected president of the United States.

Her whole campaign, after all, has been like a movie, and that’s how movies end. The fact that Harris — a Black and Asian American woman — will crush the man many Democrats see as dismissive of women and non-Whites, former President Donald Trump, is a delicious detail they will savor all their lives.