Park Geun-hye

Park Geun-hye (often in English ; born 2 February 1952) is a South Korean politician who served as the 11th (18th election) president of South Korea from 2013 to 2017, when she was impeached and convicted on related corruption charges.

Park was the first woman to be elected president of South Korea, and also the first female president popularly elected as head of state in East Asia.

She was also the first South Korean president to be born after the founding of South Korea.

Park Geun-hye was born on 2 February 1952, in Samdeok-dong of Jung District, Daegu, as the first child of Park Chung Hee, the third president of South Korea, who having come to power with the May 16 military coup d'état of 1961, served from 1963 to 1979; and his wife, First Lady Yuk Young-soo.

Both of her parents were assassinated.

She has a younger brother, Park Ji-man, and a younger sister, Park Geun-ryeong.

She is unmarried with no children.

Pew Research Center described her as an atheist with a Buddhist and Roman Catholic upbringing.

In 1953, Park's family moved to Seoul, where she graduated from Jangchung Elementary School and Sungshim (literal: Sacred Heart) Girls' Middle and High School in 1970, going on to receive a bachelor's degree in electronic engineering from Sogang University in 1974.

She briefly studied at Joseph Fourier University in France, but left following the murder of her mother.

Her father, Park Chung Hee, was president from 1963 to 1979, serving five consecutive terms after he seized power in 1961.

Park's mother was killed on 15 August 1974 in the National Theater of Korea; Mun Se-gwang, a Japanese-born ethnic Korean sympathizer of North Korea and member of the Chongryon, was attempting to assassinate her husband, President Park Chung Hee.

Park Geun-hye was regarded as First Lady until the assassination of her father by his intelligence chief, Kim Jae-gyu, on 26 October 1979.

During this time, activists who were political opponents of Park's father claimed to be subject to arbitrary detention.

Further, human rights were considered subordinate to economic development.

Park received honorary doctoral degrees from the Chinese Culture University in Taiwan in 1987, Pukyong National University and KAIST in 2008, Sogang University in 2010, and TU Dresden in 2014.

She was also a member of the National Assembly, serving four consecutive parliamentary terms between 1998 and 2012.

Park was elected a Grand National Party (GNP; later the Liberty Korea Party, or Saenuri Party) assemblywoman for Dalseong County (Daegu) in the 1998 by-election, and three more times in the same electoral district between 1998 and 2008, being the incumbent assemblywoman until April 2012.

Due to the failed attempt to impeach President Roh Moo-hyun and the bribery scandal of its 2002 presidential candidate, Lee Hoi-chang (revealed in 2004), the GNP was facing a defeat in the 2004 general election.

Park was appointed chairwoman of the party and led the election efforts.

In the election, the GNP lost its majority position but managed to gain 121 seats, which was largely considered a great achievement under such inhospitable circumstances for the party.

Before her presidency, Park was leader of the conservative Grand National Party (GNP) from 2004 to 2006 and leader of the Liberty Korea Party from 2011 to 2012.

As the chairwoman of the GNP, Park helped her party make significant gains in local elections and actually obtain a majority in 2006.

During the campaign, on 20 May 2006, Ji Chung-ho, a 50-year-old man with eight criminal convictions, slashed Park's face with a utility knife, causing an 11-centimeter wound that required 60 stitches and several hours of surgery.

A famous anecdote from this incident occurred when Park was hospitalized after the attack: the first word that she said to her secretary after her recovery from her wound was, "How is Daejeon?"

After this, the GNP candidate in the Daejeon mayoral race won the election despite having trailed by more than 20 percentage points in opinion polls up to the point of the attack.

In 2007, Park expressed regret at the treatment of activists during this period.

Park started her fifth term as a representative elected via national list in June 2012.

In 2012, Park announced she would not run for a constituency representative seat for the 19th election in Dalseong, but for a proportional representative position for the Saenuri Party instead, in order to lead the party's election campaign.

She was subsequently elected as a proportional representative in the April 2012 election.

In 2013 and 2014, Park ranked 11th on the Forbes list of the world's 100 most powerful women and the most powerful woman in East Asia.

In 2014, she ranked 46th on the Forbes list of the world's most powerful people, the third-highest South Korean on the list, after Lee Kun-hee and Lee Jae-yong.

On 9 December 2016, Park was impeached by the National Assembly on charges related to influence peddling by her top aide, Choi Soon-sil.

Then–Prime Minister Hwang Kyo-ahn assumed her powers and duties as acting president as a result.

She was found guilty of illegally taking off-the-book funds from the National Intelligence Service (NIS) and given a five-year prison sentence, and also found guilty of illegally interfering in the Saenuri Party primaries in the 2016 South Korean legislative election, for which she was sentenced to two more years in prison.

On 24 December 2021, it was announced that she would receive a pardon on compassionate grounds from South Korean President Moon Jae-in.

She was released from prison on 31 December and returned home three months later on 24 March 2022.

The Constitutional Court upheld the impeachment by a unanimous 8–0 ruling on 10 March 2017, thereby removing Park from office, making her the first Korean president to be so removed.

On 6 April 2018, South Korean courts sentenced her to 24 years in prison (later increased to 25 years) for corruption and abuse of power.

In 2018, two separate criminal cases resulted in an increase of seven years in Park's prison sentence.