The International Criminal Court, established in 2002, in the aftermath of the carnage in Rwanda and the Balkans, was designed to hold accountable future perpetrators of war crimes or crimes against humanity. It got off to a slow start: during the court’s first two decades in operation, it issued fewer than forty public arrest warrants. Most targeted African strongmen or warlords; the court almost never took on the major international powers or their closest allies, and critics complained that it effectively punished the weak while sparing the strong. (A hundred and twenty-five states are party to a treaty recognizing the court, but the United States, Russia, China, and Israel aren’t among them.) The court is governed by an assembly of the participating states, and in 2021 it elected a new chief prosecutor, Karim Khan. A fifty-five-year-old British-born lawyer whose father emigrated from Pakistan, he had previously served as an Assistant Secretary-General of the United Nations, where he’d overseen a team investigating abuses committed by ISIS. Khan vowed to reënergize the I.C.C. by upholding its promise of equal justice for all.
Khan boasted to colleagues that, in his first three years on the job, he had obtained more than forty new warrants, some not yet public. Among the public warrants were orders for the arrest of Vladimir Putin and top Russian military leaders, for war crimes in Ukraine; the leaders of Hamas, for its murderous attack on Israel on October 7, 2023; and the Israeli Prime Minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, and a former Defense Minister, Yoav Gallant, for the willful killing of civilians in Gaza, and for employing the denial of food as a weapon of war.
The Israeli warrants were easily the most controversial the court had ever issued, and also the first against a close U.S. ally. (In 2020, the first Trump Administration had sanctioned the previous I.C.C. prosecutor for merely beginning an investigation of possible crimes by U.S. forces in Afghanistan; no Americans were ultimately charged.) But Khan seemed to relish the attention his actions received. He is short and stout, with a shaved head and a gray goatee, and his austere look fits his hard-charging reputation. For much of 2024, he allowed a documentary filmmaker to follow him around the world as he conducted various investigations. That May, on the day when he applied for the Israeli warrants, Khan sat for an interview at the court with Christiane Amanpour, of CNN. A lawyer who worked closely with Khan at the court told me, “He can be a bit of a bully, and he is an impulsive character, but he is a damn good lawyer, and he thought he could do something to improve the court—to get the court back on the map.” Instead, he has become enmeshed in a scandal that threatens to cripple it.
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