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Quick answers
When did MV Sewol sink?
The ferry listed and capsized on the morning of 16 April 2014 in the Yellow Sea near Jindo, on the Incheon–Jeju route. It had left Incheon the previous night.
How many people died?
Korean official accounting used in the trials is 304 dead or missing out of 476 aboard, with 172 rescued. About 250 of the dead were Danwon High School students. Early search tallies of recovered bodies and still-missing persons shifted by single digits as the salvage continued.
Who was convicted?
Captain Lee Joon-seok received a life sentence, upheld by the Supreme Court on 12 November 2015, for homicide by wilful negligence and related counts. Other crew received terms from about 18 months to 12 years on the final appeal path. Some Coast Guard and regulatory officials were separately convicted or dismissed.
What caused the capsize?
Courts and investigation bodies pointed to a combination of a sharp turn, excess and poorly secured cargo, reduced stability after rebuilding, and insufficient ballast — not a wartime act and not a single unexplained hole.
Why did passengers stay inside?
Repeated announcements told them to wait. The captain did not issue a timely abandon-ship order. The Supreme Court treated that omission, plus the crew’s departure, as the core of the homicide-by-wilful-negligence finding.
When was the ship raised?
The hull was brought up on 23 March 2017 and later moved for examination and memorial use. Salvage was meant to recover remaining missing people and to preserve the ship as evidence.
Sewol changed Korean coastal regulation and Korean protest language.
Outside Korea it changed little statute and much photography.
Law & institutions
- Sewol Special Act 2014 — Created a family-facing investigation path and support duties that ordinary disaster law had not delivered.
- Captain’s homicide theory — The 2014–15 appellate path treated abandonment without evacuation as homicide by wilful negligence, a doctrinal marker for later maritime cases.
- Coast Guard reorganisation — The service was broken up and later rebuilt after the rescue-command failure became a political fact.
- Ferry inspection and cargo rules — Domestic passenger-ship stability, cargo declaration and drill duties were tightened on paper after 2014.
Culture
- Yellow ribbon — A grief and accountability emblem that English cameras could read without Korean text.
- Ansan memorials — The school and city keep the names. Anniversary marches remain a domestic political weather vane.
- Documentary film — Korean documentaries, later subtitled, carried family voices into English festivals more faithfully than 2014 rolling news.
- Impeachment echo — Sewol returned in 2016–17 as a trust keyword around Park Geun-hye, distinct from the Choi Soon-sil bribery file.
Money & scale
- Chonghaejin collapse — The operating company and related assets were pursued for damages and criminal proceeds.
- Salvage bill — Raising the hull was a public expenditure justified as recovery, evidence and memorial, not as commercial wreck value.
- Compensation and support — State and court-ordered payments to families ran beside arguments that money was not the demand.
The legal impact is Korean. The image impact was international and thin on statute.
Public-record encyclopedia. Not legal advice. Not a how-to. Graphic detail is withheld. Wars belong in a separate atlas.