South Korea’s President Park Geun-hye has become the country’s first democratically elected leader to be forced from office.<\/p>\n
Judges unanimously upheld parliament’s decision to impeach Ms Park over her role in a corruption scandal involving her close friend, Choi Soon-sil.<\/p>\n
She now loses her presidential immunity and could face criminal charges.<\/p>\n
There have been angry scenes outside the court. Police said two protesters had died.<\/p>\n
The court ruling is the culmination of months of political turmoil and public protest. An election must now be held within 60 days.<\/p>\n
Ms Park’s office said she would not be leaving the Blue House, South Korea’s presidential palace, on Friday nor making any statement.<\/p>\n
Acting President Hwang Kyo-ahn has called for calm, saying the government should remain stable to prevent internal conflict from spreading.<\/p>\n
Why did Park lose her job?<\/strong><\/p>\n At the heart of the drama lies the close friendship between the president and Ms Choi.<\/p>\n Ms Choi is accused of using her presidential connections to pressure companies to give millions of dollars in donations to non-profit foundations she controlled.<\/p>\n Ms Park is alleged to have been personally involved in this, and to have given Ms Choi unacceptable levels of access to official documents.<\/p>\n Parliament voted to impeach Ms Park in December and the Constitutional Court has since been deciding whether to uphold or overturn this.<\/p>\n On Friday, a panel of eight judges ruled Ms Park’s actions “seriously impaired the spirit of… democracy and the rule of law”.<\/p>\n The court said she had broken the law by allowing Ms Choi to meddle in state affairs, and had breached guidelines on official secrets by leaking numerous documents.<\/p>\n Ms Park had “concealed completely Choi’s meddling in state affairs and denied it whenever suspicions over the act emerged and even criticised those who raised the suspicions,” it said.<\/p>\n But the judges dismissed some charges, including accusations Ms Park had infringed on freedom of the press by creating a media blacklist of cultural figures, and criticism of her response during the 2014 Sewol ferry disaster.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" South Korea’s President Park Geun-hye has become the country’s first democratically elected leader to be forced from office. Judges unanimously upheld parliament’s decision to impeach Ms Park over her role in a corruption scandal involving her close friend, Choi Soon-sil. She now loses her presidential immunity and could face criminal charges. There have been angry […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":14,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jnews-multi-image_gallery":[],"jnews_single_post":[],"jnews_primary_category":[],"jnews_social_meta":[],"jnews_override_counter":[],"footnotes":""},"categories":[107],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-300788","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-international"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/citifmonline.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/300788","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/citifmonline.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/citifmonline.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/citifmonline.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/14"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/citifmonline.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=300788"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/citifmonline.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/300788\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/citifmonline.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=300788"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/citifmonline.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=300788"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/citifmonline.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=300788"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}