Down Goes International Criminal Court Prosecutor Karim Khan

"After two years of dithering, the International Criminal Court has suspended chief prosecutor Karim Khan over sexual-assault allegations. But instead of retracting the tainted arrest warrants for Israel’s Prime Minister and Defense Minister that he requested in 2024, the ICC may plow ahead with more.

The suspension was announced Monday after the ICC’s governing body voted, following a long U.N. investigation, that Mr. Khan had committed serious misconduct. Mr. Khan denies any wrongdoing. He has portrayed the allegations as a conspiracy against the court to protect Israel, though his accuser is a Malaysian Muslim ICC lawyer who supported the arrest warrants for Israeli leaders... But the belated potential dumping of Mr. Khan shouldn’t let the ICC off the hook. It kept quiet about the allegations for five months, even though—or perhaps because—it knew how they discredited the court’s attack on Israel. Shortly after Mr. Khan had learned of the allegations against him, he junked his own investigatory timeline to announce on CNN that he’d seek arrest warrants for Israeli leaders. That decision, cutting short the process and contradicting his earlier assurances of due process, shocked Mr. Khan’s own staff.

Throw in the allegation reported in these pages of an offer by Qatar to “look after” Mr. Khan (denied by both) concerning the arrest warrants, and the ICC case against Benjamin Netanyahu has been marred beyond saving. Any U.S. court would have tossed it for prosecutorial misconduct.

Instead, the ICC reportedly is now seeking arrest warrants against new Israeli ministers over long-running political disputes in the West Bank. The court has no jurisdiction since Israel isn’t an ICC member state, but it invented a work-around to target Israel and would do the same to the U.S., which also isn’t a signatory. If President Trump doesn’t sanction the rogue court now, and thus allows it to survive in current form, he could find himself in the dock post-Presidency.

The Khan scandal is sufficiently egregious to warrant bringing down the ICC. By clinging to anti-Israel lawfare even now, the court reveals the depth of its ideological commitment—and departure from legal norms."