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.

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.

The new year in politics starts with the bang of a billionaire with a bigger mouth than his bank balance.
Elon Musk has been lobbing almost as many digital darts over the Atlantic as Luke Littler has the real things in the last couple of days.
The world’s richest man has been sounding off in the strongest possible terms about the prime minister for almost as long as Sir Keir Starmer has been in Downing Street.
In recent days, the focus has been on child sexual exploitation and Musk’s allegation that the prime minister was “complicit in the rape of Britain” when he was Director of Public Prosecutions by failing to deal with the scandal.
I’m told Sir Keir “will not want to get into a food fight with Musk” but will make a robust defence of his time as chief prosecutor.
He is also keen to emphasise the importance of political debate being grounded in verifiable facts and that Musk is making claims that are “blatantly untrue” as one source put it.
Sources point, for instance, to those defending the Prime Minister’s record as DPP, including another former senior prosecutor who took to X – the social media platform Musk owns – to say Sir Keir oversaw a record number of child abuse convictions.
Those in government also point to the local inquiries there have been into the abuse and rape of vulnerable young girls by groups of men mainly of Pakistani descent – and the national inquiry conducted by Professor Alexis Jay.
The Conservatives, Reform and Elon Musk have each expressed varying degrees of outrage in recent days that the government has said no to a public inquiry into the scandal.
But few expected this weekend’s twist: that within hours of the Reform leader Nigel Farage describing Musk as a “hero” who “makes us look cool,” the X owner said Reform needed a new leader as Farage “doesn’t have what it takes”.