▲ Interior Minister Lee Sang-min (Yonhap)

(2nd LD) interior minister-court

(2nd LD) Constitutional Court unanimously rejects impeachment of interior minister

(ATTN: UPDATES throughout)

By Park Boram

SEOUL, July 25 (Yonhap) -- The Constitutional Court on Tuesday unanimously rejected the National Assembly's impeachment of Interior Minister Lee Sang-min over last year's deadly crowd crush in Seoul, a decision that immediately reinstated him as minister.

The nine-member court reached the decision, 167 days after the opposition Democratic Party-controlled National Assembly passed the impeachment motion to hold him accountable for October's crowd crush that left 159 people dead in Seoul's Itaewon district.

Lee, whose duties were suspended following the Feb. 8 impeachment, was immediately put back into office.

The main focus of the court's deliberations on the case had been whether Lee fulfilled his duty as interior minister in charge of public safety to take steps to prevent the tragedy and whether the government's response was appropriate.

The court said it is impossible to conclude that Lee failed to fulfill his constitutional duties to protect people or violated the disaster and safety management act, adding the Itaewon tragedy was the result of many factors, not a specific one.

"The defendant's remarks, including those on the cause of the disaster, were inappropriate and enough to cause public misunderstanding ... (but) it is hard to conclude that they damaged the administrative function on disaster and safety management enough to warrant his dismissal," the court said.

Lee had come under criticism from the opposition and the public for saying a day after the tragedy that the crowd at Itaewon was not worryingly huge compared with previous years, and that the disaster would not have been prevented even if police personnel had been deployed in advance.

After the court's decision, Lee offered an apology for causing concerns to the public and said the country should "stop a partisan dispute over the crowd crush and unite together to prevent a recurrence of such a disaster."

Lee was the first Cabinet minister ever to be impeached.

In the past, two presidents -- Roh Moo-hyun and Park Geun-hye -- were impeached by the National Assembly in 2004 and 2016, respectively. The Constitutional Court rejected Roh's impeachment, but endorsed Park's and ousted her from office.

In the latest case, the Constitutional Court held four rounds of public hearings on the case to hear from officials from the interior ministry, the national police and firefighting agencies, and the bereaved families of the crowd crush victims.

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