SEOUL, South Korea (AP) — South Korea's jailed former president, Yoon Suk Yeol, has appealed his life sentence for rebellion over his brief imposition of martial law in December 2024, his lawyers said Tuesday.
The conservative leader, who faces multiple trials over his power grab, expressed defiance following his conviction at the Seoul Central District Court last week. He called the decision illogical, said his actions were “solely for the sake of the nation and our people,” and accused the judge of being biased against him.
In a text message, Yoon’s lawyers said they aimed to address the supposed “errors in fact-finding and misinterpretations of the law” contained in last Thursday's ruling. The case will now be sent to a specialized panel at a Seoul High Court established under a law passed in December to handle cases involving rebellion, treason and foreign subversion.
“We will never be silent about what we view as an excessive indictment by a special prosecutor, the contradictory judgment rendered by the lower court based on that premise, and its political circumstances,” Yoon’s legal team said.
Yoon’s martial law decree, announced late at night on Dec. 3, 2024, lasted about six hours until a quorum of lawmakers broke through a blockade of heavily armed soldiers and police at the National Assembly. They then voted to overturn it, forcing his Cabinet to lift the measure.
Yoon was suspended from office on Dec. 14, 2024, after being impeached by the liberal-led legislature and was formally removed by the Constitutional Court in April 2025. He was re-arrested in July and now faces eight criminal trials over the martial law debacle and other allegations, with the rebellion charge carrying the heaviest punishment.
Though brief, Yoon’s martial law decree triggered the country’s most severe political crisis in decades, paralyzing politics and high-level diplomacy and rattling financial markets. The turmoil eased only after his liberal rival Lee Jae Myung won an early presidential election last June.
Yoon has claimed that his martial law decree was a legal and necessary act of governance against liberals controlling the legislature, portraying them as “anti-state” forces paralyzing state affairs by impeaching high-level officials, cutting his budgets and obstructing his agenda.
But the Seoul Central District Court said Yoon’s actions amounted to orchestrating a rebellion, ruling that he mobilized troops and police in an unlawful bid to seize the legislature, arrest political opponents and establish unchecked rule for a “considerable time.”
A special prosecutor who investigated Yoon’s rebellion charges had sought the death penalty, saying he deserved the harshest punishment under the law given the threat his actions posed to the country’s democracy. Following last week’s ruling, Jang Woo-sung, a member of the special prosecutor’s investigation team, hinted that they intended to appeal, saying they had unspecified “reservations” about some of the court’s factual findings and the severity of the sentence.
South Korea has not executed a death-row inmate since 1997, in what is widely seen as a de facto moratorium on capital punishment and popular calls for its abolition.
Yoon is the first former South Korean president to receive a life sentence since late military dictator Chun Doo-hwan, who was sentenced to death in 1996 for his 1979 coup, a bloody 1980 crackdown on pro-democracy protesters in Gwangju that left more than 200 people dead or missing, and corruption. The Supreme Court later reduced Chun’s sentence to life imprisonment, and he was released in late 1997 under a special presidential pardon.
FILE - South Korean lawmakers attend during a plenary session of the impeachment vote of President Yoon Suk Yeol at the National Assembly in Seoul, on Dec. 14, 2024. (Woohae Cho/Pool Photo via AP, File)
FILE - Participants react after hearing the news that South Korea's parliament voted to impeach President Yoon Suk Yeol outside the National Assembly in Seoul, South Korea, on Dec. 14, 2024. (AP Photo/Lee Jin-man, File)
FILE - Former South Korean President Yoon Suk Yeol, center, arrives at a court to attend a hearing to review his arrest warrant requested by special prosecutors in Seoul, South Korea, July 9, 2025. (Kim Hong-Ji/Pool Photo via AP, File)
LONDON (AP) — Police in Britain said Peter Mandelson, the former U.K. ambassador to the United States, has been released on bail after he was arrested in a misconduct probe stemming from his ties to the late Jeffrey Epstein. It came days after a friendship with Epstein landed the former Prince Andrew in police custody.
A Metropolitan Police spokesperson said in a statement issued just after 2 a.m. Tuesday: “A 72-year-old man arrested on suspicion of misconduct in public office has been released on bail pending further investigation.
The man was not named, in keeping with British police practice, but the suspect in the case previously was identified as the former diplomat, who is 72. Mandelson was filmed being led from his London home to a car by plainclothes officers on Monday afternoon.
Both Mandelson and Andrew Mountbatten-Windsor, the former Prince Andrew, are suspected of improperly passing U.K. government information to the disgraced U.S. financier, and the high-profile British arrests are some of the most dramatic fallout from the trove of more than 3 million pages of Epstein-related documents released last month by the U.S. Justice Department.
Police are investigating Mandelson over claims he passed sensitive government information to Epstein a decade and a half ago. He does not face allegations of sexual misconduct.
His arrest came four days after Mountbatten-Windsor was arrested in a separate case on suspicion of a similar offense related to his friendship with Epstein. He was released after 11 hours in custody while the police investigation continues.
Mandelson served in senior government roles under previous Labour governments and was U.K. ambassador to Washington until Prime Minister Keir Starmer fired him in September after emails were published showing that he maintained a friendship with Epstein after the financier’s 2008 conviction for sex offenses involving a minor.
The files released in January contained more explosive revelations about Mandelson's ties to Epstein, whom he once called “my best pal.”
Messages suggest that Mandelson passed on sensitive — and potentially market-moving — government information to Epstein in 2009, when Mandelson was a senior minister in the British government. That includes an internal government report discussing ways the U.K. could raise money after the 2008 global financial crisis, including by selling off government assets. Mandelson also appears to have told Epstein he would lobby other members of the government to reduce a tax on bankers’ bonuses.
British police launched a criminal probe earlier this month and searched Mandelson’s two houses in London and western England.
The decision to appoint Mandelson nearly cost Starmer his job earlier this month, as questions swirled around his judgment about someone who has flirted with controversy during a decades-long political career.
Though he acknowledged he made a mistake and apologized to victims of Epstein, Starmer’s position remains precarious. His future may rest on the release of files connected to Mandelson’s appointment. The government has pledged to begin releasing those documents in early March, though the timeline may be complicated by his arrest.
Mandelson has been a major, if contentious, figure in the center-left Labour Party for decades. He is a skilled — critics say ruthless — political operator whose mastery of political intrigue earned him the nickname “Prince of Darkness.”
The grandson of former Labour Cabinet minister Herbert Morrison, he was an architect of the party’s return to power in 1997 as centrist, modernizing “New Labour” under Prime Minister Tony Blair.
Mandelson served in senior government posts under Blair between 1997 and 2001, and under Prime Minister Gordon Brown from 2008 to 2010. In between, he was the European Union’s trade commissioner. Brown has been particularly angered by the revelations and has been helping police with their inquiries.
Mandelson twice had to resign from government during the Blair administration over allegations of financial or ethical impropriety, acknowledging mistakes but denying wrongdoing.
He later returned to government and was back on the political front line when Starmer named him ambassador to Washington at the start of U.S. President Donald Trump’s second term. Mandelson’s trade expertise and comfort around the ultra-rich were considered major assets. He helped secure a trade deal in May that spared Britain some of the tariffs Trump has imposed on countries around the world.
The status of the deal is now up in the air after Trump announced a new set of global tariffs in the wake of a U.S. Supreme Court decision quashing his previous import tax order.
Earlier this month Mandelson resigned from the House of Lords, Parliament’s upper chamber, to which he was appointed for life in 2008. But he still has the title — Lord Mandelson — that went with it.
FILE - Peter Mandelson leaves his home in Wiltshire, England, Feb. 20, 2026. (Ben Birchall/PA via AP, File)
Peter Mandelson is seen outside his home in north west London, Saturday, Feb. 21, 2026. (James Manning/PA via AP)
