On July 24, the States Parties to the Rome Statute voted 82 to 13, with 15 abstentions, to remove Karim Khan as Prosecutor of the International Criminal Court for serious misconduct and serious breach of duty. Norway was among the states that voted in favor of removal.
It was a landmark decision rendered at a time when the Court itself is under siege. The United States, which has already sanctioned Karim Khan, the Deputy Prosecutors and six of the Court’s judges, has announced a campaign to dismantle the Court and is urging states to withdraw from it.
So, the Court must choose a new Prosecutor in the middle of a campaign against its existence. This is a perilous moment. But it should not obscure what the vote itself demonstrated. An institution accused of answering to no one has just done what few international bodies ever have and held one of, if not, the most powerful persons inside it to account.
The Court came to this case without a mechanism built for it. When allegations of sexual misconduct by the Prosecutor first reached the Independent Oversight Mechanism (IOM) in May 2024, it decided not to open a full investigation into the claims (note that IOM’s independence in these circumstances are open to doubt). The matter had been raised to IOM by colleagues of the staff member concerned; when she declined to file a formal complaint, it closed within days. No pre-established procedure existed for allegations of this kind against an elected official.
The International Federation for Human Rights, which has defended the Court for years, warned last December that the framework for handling these allegations was incomplete, that it lacked fixed timelines, and that the complainant and the official had unequal access to the record, to the advantage of the latter. The proceedings ran more than two years, which served neither of them.
One of us told the Middle East Eye earlier this year that States Parties should let the established procedures run their course and guard against any perception that the process was being politicized. That caution was warranted. What was always clear, however, was that the Court’s oversight body could not defer indefinitely to a mechanism that had not been built for this and was advisory by nature, and that the responsibility ultimately fell where the Statute places it, which is with the State Parties. This is not unlike an impeachment: the body that appoints is the body that must be able to remove, and it answers a question about fitness for office rather than one of criminal guilt.
None of that makes the outcome unsound, and the objection now most often repeated rests on a misreading. Under the Rome Statute, the Assembly of States Parties is the Court’s management oversight body, and it is expressly empowered to decide whether an elected official should be removed for serious misconduct, serious breach of duty, or inability to perform the functions of the office. Its task is an institutional decision, informed by fact and law, about whether wrongdoing has occurred and whether confidence in a senior official can be maintained. The ad hoc panel of judges convened to assist the ASP was advisory. Its mandate, agreed in July 2025, confined it to the legal characterization of facts. It was expressly not a fact-finding body, and it heard no witnesses — nor was it meant to. Although States Parties should, and Norway certainly did, accord significant weight to its conclusions, the process ultimately vested the final decision in the States Parties themselves.
The question, then, was never whether the Bureau or the States Parties were bound to follow the panel’s advice. It was whether they acted lawfully and responsibly on all the material before them, including the investigation by the United Nations Office of Internal Oversight Services, while upholding due process and the Court’s stated policy of zero tolerance for harassment. They did.
What followed, in public, were claims of exoneration, unsubstantiated suggestions of political conspiracy, and commentary that sat uneasily with the confidentiality such proceedings require. It is worth being precise about how this took hold. In March, the advisory panel found that the investigators’ findings did not establish misconduct under the applicable framework. It was widely reported as a finding that the Prosecutor had been cleared of all wrongdoing. He had not been, and the panel had not said so.
The asymmetry in what followed is hard to miss. The proceedings were confidential, and the complainant observed that confidentiality. The officeholder and his representatives answered publicly and at length. Whatever view one takes of the merits, a moment of this kind calls for restraint from those who hold high office, not a campaign conducted in parallel to the process itself.
Amid the controversy, it is essential that the rights, dignity, and welfare of the complainant are neither marginalized nor forgotten. Due process is not owed only to the accused. Any process worthy of an institution founded on the rule of law must remain grounded in fairness, confidentiality, due process, protection from retaliation, and respect for all those involved. Individuals who come forward are not instruments in institutional disputes, nor participants in geopolitical contests. They are entitled to be heard, protected, and treated with dignity throughout. In this case, the complainant was left to defend her own name in public.
Why that first inquiry with the IOM closed so quickly is not a mystery. The Court has admittedly had workplace culture issues, and its own surveys have said so for years. But the downward direction over his tenure was unmistakable. Our review of the Court’s organization-wide survey analysis, which is not public but is provided to States Parties, shows that staff engagement fell at every survey from 2021 onward, that fewer of those who suffered misconduct reported it, and that more of those who did faced retaliation. The 2025 survey found that most staff who experienced harassment or abuse of authority named someone more senior as responsible, that most never reported it, and that fear of retaliation was the reason they gave. Not one of those who did report saw disciplinary action follow. A mechanism that depends on a subordinate filing a formal complaint against a superior does not work in an institution like this, and fixing this system is the Assembly’s task.
What the survey also shows is that low morale was not evenly spread across the Court’s organs. Asked whether they would recommend the Court as a place to work, 71 percent of judicial staff said yes. In the Office of the Prosecutor, 29 percent did — the lowest of any organ. That survey was taken in February 2025, prior to Khan taking a leave of absence. To be abundantly clear: None of it bore on the finding against him regarding the allegations of the complainant, nor should it have. The vote turned on the record of his own conduct. Yet it illuminates important context about how this drawn-out saga came about.
Any credible international institution must be able to protect those who come forward and preserve the integrity of its own processes. It cannot be paralyzed by institutional hesitation or the fear of a difficult decision. The Court’s staff are among the most capable in international justice. They should not have to spend their energy managing a hostile environment when their focus ought to be on the cases in front of them.
States Parties were presented with an investigative record and were obliged to weigh it against the standard the Statute sets. Norway did so, and concluded, as a clear majority did, that the conduct amounted to serious misconduct. This was not a political preference exercised. It was a responsibility discharged.
The result also belies criticisms of politicization. The Court has 125 States Parties: 33 African, 28 Latin American and Caribbean, 25 Western European and other, 20 Eastern European, 19 Asia-Pacific. Eighty-two votes cannot be assembled from any one region, or from any two. Whatever else this was, it was not a bloc voting on its bloc’s interests. Treating the vote as a contest between North and South does not describe what happened in that room.
Nor does the removal affect the Court’s cases. The investigation into the Situation in Palestine was opened under Fatou Bensouda in the face of an aggressive campaign of intimidation directed at her and her team. Once an investigation has been lawfully initiated, successive Prosecutors are under a duty to pursue it, lest the work of the Office become vulnerable to political interference. That work has continued under the Deputy Prosecutors and the career staff of the Office since May 2025. In alignment with Article 58 of the Rome Statute, the arrest warrants were issued not by the Prosecutor (who may merely file a request for an arrest warrant) but by independent judges, on the applications and evidence before them, and only judges can withdraw them. The Office of the Prosecutor is a permanent organ of the Court; its mandate does not begin or end with any individual officeholder.
The same holds in Ukraine. The warrants for Russian President Vladimir Putin, and Russia’s Commissioner for Children’s Rights, Maria Lvova-Belova, over the unlawful deportation of Ukrainian children, were issued by judges of this Court and are unaffected by who occupies the Prosecutor’s office. Moscow’s response was to issue a warrant for the Prosecutor himself. A Court holding warrants against both the Russian President and Israel’s leadership is not bending to any bloc of powerful states. Nor can the Prosecutor’s removal be explained by reference to those cases.
The party with the greatest stake in the Palestine warrants has said as much. In a statement issued after the vote, the Palestinian Mission in The Hague—Palestine’s official representation to the Court—described the removal as neither a proxy vote on any situation before the Court, nor an assessment of prosecutorial strategy, nor a referendum on the institution. That is the correct reading, and it came from the delegation with the least reason to offer it as a favor.
When an internal accountability process is recast as a geopolitical operation, those seeking to delegitimize the Court’s cases benefit. Those who lose are victims and survivors in Palestine, in Ukraine, in Sudan—and the next person working inside an international institution weighing whether it is worth speaking up at all.
The Assembly must improve its procedures to handle cases of alleged senior misconduct, and it should not wait to begin. An independent, pre-established mechanism for resolving allegations against elected officials must be made operational. Timelines for processing complaints must be established. Complainant and official alike must have equal access to the record. Protection against retaliation must function in practice rather than on paper. These are separate tasks from the appointment of a new Prosecutor, and neither should wait on the other.
The appointment of a new Prosecutor is urgent—a vote is not expected before the new year—and it should move quickly without being hurried; a long window serves those acting in bad faith. It does not, however, need new machinery. The Statute already sets the standard: per Article 42, the Prosecutor shall be of high moral character, and must be highly competent in and have extensive practical experience in the prosecution of criminal cases. Those words are not ornamental.
What the Office needs now is someone whose reputation and ethical compass are beyond reproach. Man or woman, the next Prosecutor should be chosen for a demonstrated commitment to getting cases into the courtroom—across every situation before the Court, on every continent where it works—rather than for a talent for self-promotion. The Assembly has just insisted that this Court is not run for the convenience of the powerful. The same should hold when it chooses who runs the Office. A genuine fresh start also means looking beyond the leadership that presided over the degrading survey results discussed above.
None of this can be separated from the pressure the Court is under. Sanctions now reach the Prosecutor’s post, the Deputy Prosecutors, six judges and a U.N. special rapporteur, and states are being encouraged to leave. When those sanctions were first imposed, only 79 of the 125 States Parties put their names to a statement rejecting them. That number should be higher.
Here is the argument for making it higher. An institution that cannot discipline itself hands its adversaries their strongest weapon. One that can, takes it away.
The authority to judge others is not self-conferred. It is earned by a willingness to be judged, and forfeited the moment that willingness fails. On July 24, the States Parties showed they still understand this. The task now is to show the same resolve in defending the Court against those who would prefer it did not exist—not as an end in itself, but because the work of fighting impunity for atrocity crimes depends on an institution that delivers justice with integrity.
