Statement on the dismissal of Karim Khan as Chief Prosecutor of the International Criminal Court.
The dismissal of Karim Khan as Chief Prosecutor of the International Criminal Court is a double victory for Donald Trump and Netanyahu. It is a compelling warning to other international civil servants against interfering with him, US government policies or their foreign allies. And it also marks yet another stage in the undermining of the institutions created to uphold the framework of international law on which we all depend.
The International Criminal Court was set up in 2002 to exercise jurisdiction in circumstances where national courts are unwilling or unable to prosecute criminals. Its establishment in effect completed the legal arrangements established after the Second World War to ensure that no repetition of the horrors of the Nazi regime would be possible. The dismissal of Karim Khan as Chief Prosecutor of the International Criminal Court is a significant marker of the worrying state of our 2026 world.
That post-war settlement was only as strong as the enforcement power of states committed to it. The United States originally positioned itself as the guarantor of all the post-war arrangements. In recent years its abandonment and sabotage of the system means that the whole architecture is now on the edge of ruin. The dismissal of Khan was achieved by a naked exercise of political power by the United States, acting for itself as well as its accomplice Israel. When Karim Khan signalled his aim to target Israeli politicians, a US politician quietly advised him that the court had been ‘built for Africa and thugs like Putin’, not for allies such as Israel; Khan publicized the warning.
In 2024 Khan issued arrest warrants for Israeli PM Netanyahu, then Defence Minister Yoav Gallant and three Hamas leaders Mohammed Deif, Yahya Sinwar and Ismail Haniyeh. (All three have since been killed by Israel.) Decisions to prosecute are not made by one person alone. This one followed the advice of a panel of six lawyers including Amal Clooney, Baroness Helena Kennedy and 94-year old Jewish Holocaust survivor Judge Theodor Meron.
We are asked to believe that Khan’s dismissal was the result solely of his inappropriate conduct towards a member of his staff – and not the arrest warrants against Netanyahu and Gallant. And yet the three senior judges appointed by the ICC, who studied thousands of pages of evidence over a one-year investigation, concluded unanimously that there was insufficient evidence to establish misconduct or breach of duty by Khan.
No matter – by February 2025 Trump was gunning for the ICC for its temerity in claiming jurisdiction over criminal actions alleged to have been carried out by US or Israeli citizens. To override the judges who had actually heard the case against Khan, an unprecedented special session of the ICC’s oversight body, the 125-strong Assembly of State Parties, was convened. Of them 82 were persuaded to vote for Khan’s dismissal. One can reasonably infer that these national votes were based on avoiding Trump’s retaliation against their countries (or reps), more than on considering the evidence against Khan.
Israel has been open about wanting Khan to be sacked and is now celebrating his departure. Israel too has long been working to undermine the Court as, in effect, an obstacle to its own freedom of law-breaking action. In 2024, an in-depth investigation by +972, Local Call and the Guardian found that “(f)or nearly a decade, Israel has been surveilling senior International Criminal Court officials and Palestinian human rights workers as part of a secret operation to thwart the ICC’s probe into alleged war crimes.” Surveillance was also directed against Khan’s predecessor Fatou Bensouda, trying and failing to prevent the court from opening a full investigation. Efforts to dissuade her from proceeding included an attempted ‘sting’ operation on her husband. The +972 report says that “Israel’s covert war on the ICC has relied centrally on surveillance, and the chief prosecutors have been prime targets.”
The ICC is one of the key Institutions established since 1945 to secure accountability when international law was violated. Israel has been one of the most copious, deliberate violators of international legal conventions.
Israel is rushing headlong to embrace and intensify its place as a pariah state. It violates international law, and works to undermine the now increasingly fragile framework of conventions and institutions that stand between us and barbarism.
As Jews from six continents we are outraged, the more so as Israel still claims to be acting in the name of all Jews. Not in Our Name.
We have among us still those who suffered directly from the evil excesses that, at least, generated our protective legal conventions and institutions. Most of us are at most a generation or two distant from those who directly experienced that oppression and persecution. We understand all too well the vital importance of international law and the institutions to enforce it, and the dangers of allowing violations to go unpunished.