Prosecutors are launching an investigation into Cho Kuk and Im Jong-seok, both of whom served top roles at former President Moon Jae-in’s Cheong Wa Dae, over allegations that they blacklisted high-ranking public officials appointed during the Park Geun-hye administration. The Seoul Central Prosecutors’ Office has recently tapped its criminal department to handle the investigation into two ex-Che...

South Korea is warily eyeing its latest bump in cases as omicron’s new and likely more elusive subvariant, BA.5, begins to dominate. For two consecutive days on Sunday, the number of cases counted daily topped 20,000 -- a mark that has not been passed since mid-May in the aftermath of the spring omicron wave. Over the most recent seven-day period, 17,467 cases were reported per day on average, ...

Women and doctors still navigate murky legal waters when it comes to abortion in Korea, despite the practice having been decriminalized over a year ago. The ban on abortion was ruled unconstitutional in April 2019, but the National Assembly has failed to meet its deadline -- which expired on the last day of 2020 -- to make new laws to reflect the changes. As of Jan. 1 last year, abortion was no...

The family of Lee Dae-jun, a fisheries official killed by North Korean soldiers at sea in 2020, on Thursday called for arresting former President Moon Jae-in’s spy chief, Park Jie-won, who is already facing a criminal investigation after he was reported by the National Intelligence Service to the prosecutors. The NIS on Wednesday filed a criminal report against Park, who served as its director...

The National Intelligence Service on Wednesday filed a criminal report against its former chiefs Park Jie-won and Suh Hoon, alleging abuses of power in two high-profile cases involving North Korea. In a message to reporters, the NIS said it reported Park, who served as its director from July 2020 until Moon Jae-in’s term as president ended in May, to the Supreme Prosecutors’ Office after an in...

The BA.5 version of omicron is on course to take over as the dominant COVID-19 virus in South Korea, with the number of cases tied to the variant having tripled over course of a week, data showed Wednesday. The BA.5 variant appeared in 24.1 percent of sequenced samples in the last week of June, more than triple the prior week’s 7.5 percent, according to the Korea Disease Control and Prevention A...

Meanwhile, Lee family lawyer Kim Ki-yun on Monday filed for the Board of Audit and Inspection to look into what was communicated to the search squad by the presidential office and the government during the hours the official would still have been alive. “We need to find out if and when Cheong Wa Dae and the Defense Ministry informed the search-and-rescue team about Lee’s exact location and the t...

South Korea has joined the European Union’s digital COVID-19 certificate system, to come into effect from Friday. The connection to the system allows certificates of vaccination issued in South Korea to be valid in EU countries, and vice versa. “The equivalent COVID-19 certificates will facilitate travel between South Korea and the 31 member states of the EU,” the Korea Disease Control and Preve...

Gangwon Province, on the east coast of South Korea, is set to have more autonomy as a municipality. A Cabinet meeting on June 7 voted in favor of laws giving Gangwon Province new status as a “special autonomous province,” which will come into effect from June 11 next year. The special status was proposed as a pledge during the 2012 and 2017 presidential campaigns, but was never fulfilled. Gang...

The estimated annual number of abortions has declined drastically in Korea over 10 years from 241,411 in 2008 to 23,175 in 2018, before climbing slightly to 26,985 in 2019 and 32,063 in 2020. “At this point it’s hard to make an association between the change in abortion’s legal status in Korea and in the rates of incidence,” Byoun Soo-jung, a population policy researcher at KIHASA, told reporter...

Prosecutors who worked closely with President Yoon Suk-yeol while he was the prosecutor general are returning to fill top jobs at anti-corruption departments of the prosecution service. Many of the reshuffled prosecutors were those who were demoted during the Moon Jae-in administration for their role in special counsel investigations against the former president’s close aides. The Ministry of...

Lee’s son sent an open letter to Yoon on June 17, a day after the Coast Guard announced there was no evidence of a defection, in which he thanked the president for remembering his promise. “My mother, my younger sister and I had to live the past year and nine months as the family of a defector,” he said in the letter. “My father disappeared overnight. I couldn’t understand what was happening and...

The thousands of cases South Korea is still counting every day may be as low as the numbers are going to get, according to some top public health officials. In the last 24 hours ending Tuesday midnight, South Korea logged 10,463 new cases, exceeding the 10,000 mark for the first time in nearly three weeks. Lim Sook-young, a senior Korea Disease Control and Prevention Agency official, told a new...

Former President Lee Myung-bak, 81, was granted a stay of sentence due to his health concerns, Suwon prosecutors said Tuesday. The Suwon prosecution service’s deliberation committee said in a press release that Lee was deemed to be “physically unfit” to be in jail, and that he would be granted a three-month break from his time. The deliberation committee decided that the ex-president could face ...

The family of Lee Dae-jun, a South Korean fisheries official who was killed by North Korean troops at sea in 2020, and their lawyer said Tuesday they plan on reaching out to a United Nations expert on extrajudicial killings for help. The official’s older brother, Lee Rae-jin, and his lawyer Kim Ki-yun met with Tomas Ojea Quintana, the UN special rapporteur on the human rights situation in North ...