Rival parties continue negotiations on special counsel bill to investigate Yoon

Moving on to the National Assembly now.

Ruling and opposition lawmakers have yet to find common ground on drafting a bill that paves the path to a special probe into the president's short-lived martial law.

Our correspondent Lee Shi-hoo is on the line with the latest.

Shi-hoo, let's begin with today's bipartisan meeting for the probe bill.

Yes Sunny, the floor leaders of the rival parties, the PPP's Kweon Seong-dong and the DP's Park Chan-dae met for closed-door talks beginning at 1:30 this afternoon.

The presider over the meeting, National Assembly Speaker Woo Won-sik has urged both to "make concessions" so that an agreement can be reached today.

He's gone so far as to even suspend this afternoon's plenary session to wait for a potential consensus, but it's unclear whether the parties will be able to reach an agreement today.

The talks were originally scheduled to start at 11 this morning, but were delayed by over two hours as the PPP took longer than expected to fine-tune the details of its proposal.

Prior to the meeting, just this morning, PPP Floor Leader Kweon urged the DP to abandon their bill that he said was "unconstitutional."

Listen in.

"There is no need for a special counsel. But the DP is using the power of a major party to pass an "unconstitutional, illegal" bill full of "toxic clauses," so we are compelled to choose a worse option over the worst one. This is why we are developing our version of the special counsel bill."

Kweon added additional investigations were unnecessary, as ongoing probes by several authorities are already taking place.

He said the DP is using the bill for political gain.

This came while DP Floor Leader Park urged the ruling party to cooperate with the DP's efforts and to come to the negotiating table.

"If we don't remove the deep-seated fine roots of the insurrection, they will sprout again. To prevent the recurrence of unfortunate incidents, a special prosecution should be conducted to find out the truth in a transparent manner and to strictly punish those who were involved."

DP spokesperson Park Sung-joon also told reporters that if the PPP comes up with an "insincere" bill today to defend Yoon, the DP will proceed with its version, without further negotiations.

The deadline for talks presented by the DP is midnight tonight.

If an agreement isn't reached by then, they will put up their bill for an Assembly-wide vote.

Meanwhile, Acting President Choi Sang-mok previously urged the rival parties to reach an agreement, and has hinted that if a compromise isn't reached, it's likely he may veto a unilateral bill from the opposition.

Park called out this remark by Choi, urging that he should "respect any decision by the National Assembly and accept the special counsel bill."

So what exactly are the sticking points between the rival parties?

Yes, the biggest differences are in the scope, depth and period of investigation.

The primary focus of the opposition's bill, proposed earlier this month, is to uncover whether President Yoon unlawfully instigated an insurrection, and violated the Constitution in the process.

The PPP's version, however, removes these allegations of "insurrection" and also that of "the inducement of foreign aggression."

It aims to look into five specific allegations overall, in comparison to the 11 presented by the opposition.

The PPP's bill also shortens the investigation period to a maximum of 110 days, compared to the DP's 150.

As for the size of the investigation team, the PPP is pushing for a team of 58, while the DP is aiming for 155.

Now, overall this is the second attempt by the opposition to push a bill of this kind.

The initial version of the bill was vetoed by Acting President Choi two weeks ago.

The opposition's goal, this time, is to have the special counsel officially go into effect before the upcoming Lunar New Year holiday.

Sunny.

All right Shi-hoo, thank you for that report from the parliament.