Park Geun-hye finally had to resign in March 2017. By then, Koreans had taken to the streets all winter, in a series of mass protests against the corruption of the country’s president.
She was convicted of helping to extort money from companies, and asked people who worked for her to give away secret documents. The original the sentence was 30 years, but it was appealed to the Supreme Court and reduced to 20 years in prison.
The mass protests in the winter of 2017 finally led to the resignation of the president.
Foto: Ahn Young-joon / AP
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First woman
Park Geun-hye was South Korea’s first female president when she was elected in 2013. She is the daughter of former military leader and dictator Park Chung-hee.
The corruption scandal revealed links between the country’s major corporations and the political leadership. Park and her friend Choi Soon-sil accepted bribes from, among others, the electronics company Samsung.
The former president has always pleaded not guilty.
– We must look ahead, not backwards.
South Korea’s justice minister says the former president is pardoned for “healing social conflicts and rebuilding the local community.”
– We must go into the future by overcoming the pain of the past. It’s time for us all to be brave and move in the same direction, instead of fighting each other over the past. The country’s president Moon Jae-in wrote in a statement according to the news agency AFP.
In his pardon, President Moon emphasized the former president’s poor health.
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