The partisan power of the pardon takes center stage in South Korea

SEOUL, South Korea — Conservatives in South Korea — out of power and, in the high-profile cases of former President Yoon Suk Yeol and his wife, facing serious legal jeopardy — found little to cheer in the list of pending pardons released by the country’s left-leaning president this week.

Two names in particular on President Lee Jae-myung’s list of pardons — a presidential tradition on the country’s annual Liberation Day holiday, which falls on Friday — have irked the liberal president’s political opponents on the right.

Mr. Lee announced Monday that he plans to pardon 2,188 business people, activists and politicians, including Cho Kuk, a short-lived justice minister and a political nemesis of the jailed Mr. Yoon, and Yoon Mee-hyang, an advocate for “comfort women” who generated Seoul-Tokyo frictions.

Weaponization of law enforcement?

Mr. Cho, a political ally of the current president, was ousted from his seat in the National Assembly in December after losing an appeal of a two-year prison sentence for falsifying documents that helped his children gain entrance to elite schools. He was forced to resign in 2019 from the administration of Moon Jae-in, South Korea’s president from 2017 to 2022, amid clashes with the country’s top prosecutor, Mr. Yoon.

Mr. Yoon’s defiance of the Moon administration led conservatives to woo him to run as the People Power Party’s candidate in the 2022 presidential election. He won that race with a narrow victory over Mr. Lee.

Mr. Yoon’s impeachment opened the door to a new presidential election, which Mr. Lee handily won in June.

Mr. Yoon is now being investigated by the prosecutors he formerly led.

A pardon for Mr. Cho, 60, could open the door for his reentry to politics.

It’s a Japan thing

Mr. Lee, a lifelong Japan basher, dialed back his criticism enough to win the June election. However, the pardon of Ms. Yoon is a reminder of the animosity he and many of his countrymen still feel over Japanese atrocities during World War II.

Ms. Yoon was the highest-profile advocate of “comfort women,” the girls and women from across Asia who served in Japanese military brothels during the war.

Although numbers are unclear, evidence suggests a considerable proportion, possibly a majority, were Koreans.

From 1990, Ms. Yoon led a high-profile nongovernmental organization, the Korean Council, that promoted the term “sex slavery” to illustrate the women’s plight. The group also promoted a weekly demonstration around a comfort woman statue placed outside the Japanese Embassy in Seoul, to Tokyo’s displeasure.

Through these and related efforts, comfort women gained global notoriety, with statues sprouting in locations such as San Francisco and Berlin.

Ms. Yoon used her profile to shame comfort women who accepted reparations from Japan and angrily argued that Japanese apologies were insufficient or insincere, dooming Tokyo’s efforts.

She served as a lawmaker in a satellite party of the DPK during Mr. Moon’s term, when Seoul-Tokyo relations plummeted to a nadir.

In 2020, a former comfort woman accused Ms. Yoon of generating hatred between Japanese and Korean youths, of exhausting elderly victims and of appropriating funds destined for their welfare.

In 2024, Ms. Yoon was found guilty of embezzlement and sentenced to an 18-month suspended sentence. An appeal failed.

She never accepted guilt but suffered reputational damage. The Korean Council lost steam.

Under Mr. Yoon’s presidency, with the decades of protests fizzling, historical disputes between Seoul and Tokyo cooled, enabling improved bilateral relations and trilateral security activities with Washington.

To some surprise, Mr. Lee has followed Mr. Yoon’s lead, not Mr. Moon’s, and maintained good relations with Tokyo.

However, one of the country’s leading conservative newspapers, The Chosun Ilbo, questioned the two pardons in an Aug. 12 editorial.

It called Mr. Cho’s crime “a clear case of unfairness and injustice” and Ms. Yoon’s pardon “nothing short of absurd.”

The Chosun acknowledged that conservatives have not been “blameless” when it comes to pardons but that the upcoming tranche is “deeply wrong and went too far.”