ICC votes on firing prosecutor Karim Khan

The ICC votes on its own prosecutor — and the court's most explosive cases hang in the balance

On July 24, 125 member states will decide whether to fire Karim Khan, the prosecutor who secured arrest warrants against Putin, Netanyahu, and Duterte. But the real question is whether a political body will override the unanimous finding of three judges who cleared him — and what that tells Washington about the court's vulnerabilities.

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On July 24, 2026, the 125 member states of the International Criminal Court will convene a special session at United Nations headquarters in New York to vote on whether to fire chief prosecutor Karim Khan for alleged sexual misconduct. The vote — the first of its kind in the court's 24-year history — will require a simple majority of 63 states to remove the man who has done more than any prosecutor in the institution's history to extend its reach beyond the geopolitically weak, according to the ASP's official session documentation. The outcome will determine whether Khan leads the November 30 trial of former Philippine President Rodrigo Duterte — or whether a political body has decided to disregard the unanimous conclusion of the three judges it handpicked to assess the evidence against him.

The legal finding vs. the political result

The factual core of the case is not seriously disputed. A United Nations Office of Internal Oversight Services (OIOS) investigation, commissioned in November 2024 and running through December 2025, examined allegations that Khan had engaged in sexual misconduct with a female aide. The inquiry generated more than 5,000 pages of evidence and testimony, according to the BBC. In April 2026, the UN investigators concluded that Khan had "nonconsensual contact" with his aide in "his office, at his private residence" and while on a mission, Al Jazeera reported, citing the Associated Press.

But when the ASP Bureau — the court's 21-member executive committee — convened a three-judge panel to legally characterize those factual findings, the result was unambiguous. In an 85-page report delivered on March 9, 2026, the panel "unanimously concluded that no misconduct or breach of duty by Khan could be established under the legal framework," as reported by Middle East Eye and subsequently confirmed by Al Jazeera. The judges found the OIOS had "failed to indicate which witnesses' testimony they found credible" and "did not resolve narrative inconsistencies."

That should have ended the matter — or led, at most, to a finding of misconduct of a less serious nature, which the Bureau could have sanctioned directly without a plenary vote. Instead, on June 8, 2026, a qualified majority of the Bureau voted to find "serious misconduct" and a "serious breach of duty," suspended Khan with immediate effect, and referred his removal to the full Assembly, according to the ICC's official Bureau decision. The Bureau stressed that "this suspension is not an indication of the final outcome" — but the sequence was unmistakable: a political body had substituted its judgment for that of its own judicial panel.

Former ICC judges Cuno Tarfusser and Sergey Vasiliev, writing in Al Jazeera after the panel's report leaked, called the prospect of overruling the judges "deleterious to the rule of law, due process, and the integrity of the legal determination." They added: "Disregarding the report will create the impression that the panel was only needed to assist states in reaching one specific conclusion. The spectre of a show trial looms large."

Khan's lead defence counsel, Sareta Ashraph — a specialist in gender-competent legal analysis who reviewed the OIOS evidence personally — went further in her own Al Jazeera account. She revealed that the Bureau had circulated a summary of the OIOS report that drew from a narrative overview rather than the actual findings section, and that "civil society organisations, none of whom had access to the evidence, began to advocate for the bureau to disregard the reasoned analysis and unanimous conclusion of the judicial panel." Her warning was stark:

"Were an ICC prosecutor to be removed or even sanctioned by political actors after having been exonerated by an independent Judicial Panel, it would raise grave questions about the independence of the Office of the Prosecutor, particularly when that office has broadened the reach of the court beyond that of geopolitically weaker states."

Who stands to gain

The alignment of interests converging on Khan's removal is unusual — and unusually powerful.

The Trump administration announced a "whole-of-government response to systematically disable" the ICC on July 13, just eleven days before the vote, Al Jazeera reported. Secretary of State Marco Rubio pledged in a Wall Street Journal op-ed to "dismantle the ICC, brick by brick, if necessary." The State Department listed "actions under consideration" including "increased scrutiny of nations that refuse to reject the ICC's false authority while relying on US assistance," as well as expanded sanctions and travel bans on ICC personnel. The timing is not coincidental: as William Schabas, professor of international law at Middlesex University, told Al Jazeera, the administration "may be viewing the ICC as in a weakened position as it deals with internal scandals surrounding lead prosecutor Karim Khan." The Carnegie Endowment described the campaign as "a coercive attempt to impose the United States's will on the rest of the world" — and a Khan weakened or removed by his own member states would be Exhibit A.

Israel has actively sought Khan's disqualification since the arrest warrants for Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and former Defence Minister Yoav Gallant were issued on November 21, 2024. In May 2025, Israel filed a formal request to "withdraw, vacate or declare of no force or effect" the warrants, according to ICC court records. The Pre-Trial Chamber rejected that request, but the political calculus is different. A bipartisan group of six U.S. Senators — led by Lindsey Graham — sent a letter to the ASP in November 2024 calling for a vote on Khan's removal, explicitly linking the timing of his warrant applications against Israeli officials to the emergence of the misconduct allegations, as documented on Graham's Senate website.

Russia and the Philippines have their own obvious interests. Khan secured the arrest warrant for Vladimir Putin in March 2023 over the deportation of Ukrainian children. The Duterte trial — with charges confirmed on April 23, 2026, and trial opening scheduled for November 30, 2026 — represents one of the fastest prosecutions in ICC history, as the Prosecution noted in its May 2026 submission to Trial Chamber III. If Khan is removed, his successor would inherit the case and could reprioritize it.

The cases that define his tenure

Khan was elected in February 2021 on the second ballot with 72 votes, according to ASP election records. Since taking office on June 16, 2021, he has:

• Secured the arrest warrant against Vladimir Putin in March 2023 for the unlawful deportation of Ukrainian children
• Applied for and secured arrest warrants against Netanyahu and Gallant on November 21, 2024, for war crimes including starvation as a method of warfare
• Secured the arrest and surrender of Rodrigo Duterte on March 12, 2025, with charges confirmed on April 23, 2026 — the first former head of state from Asia to face ICC trial
• Advanced investigations in Sudan, with the Office "taking final steps to present applications for arrest warrants against individuals responsible for crimes in West Darfur," according to the Prosecutor's 40th report to the UN Security Council