Park Geun-hye

Park Geun-hye (/ˈpɑːrk ˌɡʊn ˈheɪ/; Korean: 박근혜 [pak‿k͈ɯn.hje]; born 2 February 1952) is a South Korean politician who served as the 11th president of South Korea from 2013 to 2017, when she was removed from office by the Constitutional Court following her impeachment. Park was the first and to date only woman to be elected president of South Korea, and also the first woman to be popularly elected as a head of state in East Asia. She is also the first South Korean president to be born after the founding of South Korea. Her father, Park Chung Hee, was president from 1963 to 1979, serving five consecutive terms after he seized power in 1961 and whom she served as first lady under from 1974 until his assassination in 1979.

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. She was also a member of the National Assembly, serving four consecutive parliamentary terms between 1998 and 2012. Park started her fifth term as a representative elected via national list in June 2012. 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. 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. She was found guilty of illegally taking off-the-books 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[10] and returned home three months later on 24 March 2022.

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