Karim Khan, the Chief Prosecutor of the International Criminal Court from 2021 until his removal in 2026, ultimately lost his position after an investigation concluded that he had engaged in serious sexual misconduct toward a female subordinate. Khan denied the allegations, insisting they were false and politically motivated. Nevertheless, following an extensive investigation by the ICC’s oversight bodies, he was first suspended and then dismissed by an overwhelming vote of the Court’s member states—the first sitting ICC prosecutor ever removed from office.
The scandal also cast a cloud over Khan’s handling of the ICC’s investigation into Israel. According to The Wall Street Journal, after learning in May 2024 that the allegations against him were about to become public, Khan abruptly canceled plans to continue gathering evidence in Israel and Gaza and instead quickly announced that he would seek arrest warrants for Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and Defense Minister Yoav Gallant, along with Hamas leaders. Whether or not the timing reflected an effort to divert attention from his personal scandal, it undeniably deprived the investigation of additional fact-finding that Khan himself had apparently considered necessary only days earlier. The warrants were later issued by the ICC and remain in effect despite Khan’s removal because they are orders of the Court, not of the individual prosecutor.
Anti-Israel activists such as Zohran Mamdani will no doubt continue to invoke those warrants as proof that Netanyahu is a “wanted war criminal.” But even putting aside the troubling circumstances surrounding Khan’s decision to seek them, the warrants suffer from a separate and fundamental legitimacy problem.
As my colleague and co-blogger Eugene Kontorovich observed in 2024, Khan’s decision-making process was compromised by his reliance on a handpicked group of advisers and outside experts who had already spent years publicly accusing Israel of war crimes and advocating legal action against it. Rather than assembling a balanced panel representing a range of views on the difficult legal questions presented by the conflict, Khan chose individuals whose public records left little doubt where they stood. To say the least, this was hardly a process designed to inspire confidence in the ICC’s impartiality.
As Kontorovich notes, the most striking example was Kevin Jon Heller of the University of Copenhagen, whom Khan publicly thanked for his assistance when announcing the charges. Heller had endorsed the anti-Israel BDS movement, described Israel as systematically denying Palestinians basic rights, called Israel “the Donald Trump of repressive states,” and in 2020 referred to Benjamin Netanyahu and Donald Trump as “two criminals conspiring to commit criminal acts against Palestine.” He frequently relied on anti-Israel NGOs while dismissing pro-Israel organizations as traffickers in “fake law and propaganda.” Nor were these isolated remarks. For example, in 2015, Heller declared that “my political sympathies are very much with Palestine” and said that he did not doubt Israel had committed various war crimes.
Kontorovich shows that the broader panel reflected the same pattern. Baroness Helena Kennedy had long urged ICC investigations of Israel, accused Israel of violating international law in Gaza, and publicly demanded that “enough is enough.” Danny Friedman had already argued that Israel’s pre-10/7 siege operations amounted to war crimes. Amal Clooney likewise had a well-established record of criticizing Israeli policy, while even the panel’s Israeli member, former judge Theodor Meron, was better known for criticizing Israel’s conduct than for defending it.
Missing entirely was anyone who had publicly questioned the ICC’s jurisdiction over the conflict, challenged the legal theories underlying the proposed charges, or expressed skepticism that Israeli officials had committed international crimes. A panel assembled in that fashion could scarcely be expected to provide the independent, objective review that the gravity of seeking arrest warrants against the leaders of a democratic country at war.
