South Korea's former prime minister Han Duck-soo has been sentenced to 23 years in prison, the first judicial ruling to say that the martial law episode launched by former president Yoon Suk Yeol amounted to insurrection. The court ordered Han detained immediately, turning a long-running political and constitutional dispute into one of the country's most serious criminal verdicts in years.
The ruling centers on Han's role in helping create the appearance of a lawful cabinet process around Yoon's failed decree on 3 December 2024. Judge Lee Jin-kwan said Han, as prime minister, had a constitutional duty to stop the move instead of joining it. The court found that he helped create a minimum quorum for the meeting while blocking meaningful debate, and it said he had continued to conceal evidence and lie throughout the trial. Han remained free during the proceedings until this verdict.
The evidence described by the court was especially damaging. According to the supplied report, CCTV footage showed Han nodding as Yoon explained the plan and receiving documents including the martial law proclamation. The court also pointed to an 8 December phone call in which Han told a presidential aide to destroy a backdated martial law document and said to make it as if his signature had never existed. Those details pushed the court to treat the case as more than passive compliance.
Han was also found guilty of creating false documents, destroying presidential records and perjury during Yoon's impeachment proceedings. Prosecutors had sought 15 years, arguing that Han was the only person constitutionally positioned to stop the decree by refusing to countersign it or convene the cabinet meeting. The judge rejected using older military coup cases as the main benchmark and instead described the episode as a self-coup by elected power that posed unique dangers to democracy.
The sentence closes one chapter but not the broader legal reckoning. The verdict comes just five days after another court sentenced Yoon to five years for obstructing his own arrest, and Yoon's separate insurrection trial is due on 19 February. Prosecutors have said they want the death penalty in that case. Han, a career diplomat who served five presidents, now has the right to appeal, but the immediate consequence is that one of the most senior figures in the Yoon administration has been formally condemned for helping legitimize the failed martial law attempt.
For South Korea's political system, the ruling sends a clear message that the machinery of government cannot be used to decorate an unconstitutional act with procedural legitimacy. Whether the appeals process softens the punishment or not, the original judgment has already established a historic precedent. A former prime minister has been treated not as a bystander but as an active participant in the attempt to impose martial law, and the court has said that role merits decades in prison.
The case now becomes a test of how far South Korea will go in treating failed martial law not as a political crisis alone but as a punishable assault on constitutional order. That standard may shape every appeal and every future case tied to the December 2024 events.
