Injunction Filed Against Start of Construction at Yongin Semiconductor National Industrial Complex
As news spread of construction beginning at the Yongin semiconductor national industrial complex, the appellants' attorney filed an injunction application with the Seoul High Court on October 30. The applicants argued that if construction proceeds as planned, residents will lose their homes and environmental damage will be unavoidable, calling for a full review of the project. An injunction is a mechanism that temporarily suspends the effect of an administrative disposition while litigation is ongoing. Article 23, Paragraph 2 of the Administrative Litigation Act allows courts to grant such relief when there is an urgent need to prevent irreparable harm.
The construction start notice for the Yongin semiconductor national industrial complex was issued without any relocation measures for residents. Residents still live within the planned site, and 89 small and medium-sized enterprises have factories in operation there. Expropriation proceedings have not been completed, and neither residential land for displaced residents nor relocation sites for businesses have been developed. LH announced construction would begin in October but gave no specific date and held no groundbreaking ceremony. Records on the information disclosure system show LH submitted its construction start notice around October 27. On site, extensive deforestation has already taken place under the pretext of construction preparation.
The designation process, which bypassed open competition, is also controversial. On December 26, 2022, the Ministry of Trade, Industry and Energy launched a call for national advanced strategic industry specialized complexes, receiving 15 applications in the semiconductor sector alone. Samsung Electronics submitted its application on February 27, 2023, according to a fact-verification inquiry the court made to the Ministry of Trade, Industry and Energy during the appeal. Yet in late February 2023, before the review even began, the ministry sent an official letter to the Ministry of Land, Infrastructure and Transport requesting that Yongin be designated a national industrial complex. The land ministry added Yongin to the 14 national industrial complexes then in development, bringing the total to 15, and former President Yoon Suk Yeol personally announced it on March 15, 2023. The applicants point out that the announcement came a mere 20 days after the application was filed.
In reality, the project would build a complex requiring 10 gigawatts of electricity and vast water supplies in Yongin, an area that lacks both power and water. This is driving construction of 345,000-volt ultra-high-voltage transmission lines across the country, alongside a water supply plan that would tap into the Hwacheon Dam.
The administrative litigation over this matter had already concluded once and is now being heard again. Residents and environmental activists filed suit seeking the cancellation of the land ministry's December 31, 2024 approval of the industrial complex plan; they lost at the first trial, but the appeal is now underway. The injunction application is attached to that appeal. The applicants are demanding that a societal discussion begin toward a full review of the project.
