“Further into lawlessness”Did the Trump regime just destroy the International Criminal Court?
25 JULY—I live in one of those postindustrial towns you find all over New England, and nothing happened here Friday, the day the International Criminal Court’s governing body voted at the U.N. Secretariat in New York, 102.7 miles away, to remove Karim Khan as the I.C.C.’s chief prosecutor. People mowed their lawns, shopped at the Big “Y” market, rode motorcycles up and down the streets, checked the mail, ordered pizza. Children swam in above-ground pools while parents took the sun in beach chairs. The invisibility of our descent into barbarism—America’s descent, by extension the West’s altogether. This was my thought for the day yesterday, this what causes me to marvel. How many of my neighbors know who Karim Khan is? How many know even what the I.C.C. is, what it does, and why what it does is important even to the mowers of lawns among us? How many understand that Khan’s dismissal as chief prosecutor, at the obvious behest of the Trump regime, is a frightening step—not the first but maybe the most consequential to date—toward a lawless world in which extremes of brutality and institutional violence are… choose your term… routinized, normalized, accepted as instruments of power? I do not mean to recite abstractions or the preoccupations of a professional commentator. The world—the world of power and geopolitics—is distant as most of us look across our lawns and down our driveways: This is how it is meant to seem. But it draws very close as the late-phase imperium resists in a state of desperation its decline. Ignorance is but the most pitiable defense against it, and there will be a price to pay for it. ■ Karim Ahmad Khan trained as a barrister in Britain and is a recognized specialist in international law and human rights law. Crown prosecutor for England and Wales, legal officer attached to the Criminal Tribunals for the former Yugoslavia and later Rwanda: Khan brought an impeccable record for integrity and legal expertise to his appointment at the I.C.C. in 2021. In May 2024, a year and some into the genocide in Gaza, Khan announced that he would request arrest warrants for Bibi Netanyahu, Yoav Gallant, the Israeli PM’s defense minister at the time, and various others. The same month, a legal assistant in Khan’s office, identified only as “Sarah,” accused Khan of sexual misconduct—accusations that became public in October 2024. Khan has credibly denied all of these, but so did the subversions of the Zionists and the regime in Washington—Biden’s at the time—begin. I and others have written of this in some detail. A few of these pieces are here, here, and here. It is a repellent story, start to finish. After an exhaustive investigation over many months a judicial panel appointed by the Court cleared Khan of all charges of misconduct last March. The Court’s governing body, the Assembly of States Parties, subsequently changed its procedural rules so that it could vote on Khan’s innocence or guilt anyway. This was the vote held last Friday. The Guardian reports that 82 of the Court’s 125 member states voted to oust Khan. John Whitbeck, an international attorney with long experience in these Court matters, put it this way in his privately circulated blog after the results of the vote came out Friday afternoon New York time:
Whitbeck’s reference to the Trump regime’s threat to destroy the Court refers to Marco Rubio’s full-frontal declaration of intent last week, the 24 July vote a few days away:
The State Department document issued as Rubio spoke is here. But Washington’s attacks on the Court predate this latest aggression by many years. The United States has not ratified the Rome Statute, which established the I.C.C. 24 years ago, and it has never since ceased its attempts to subvert the Court’s authority. President Trump has simply escalated a campaign two and a half decades long. A month after he reassumed office last year he signed an executive order that brought the number of I.C.C. judges and prosecutors under U.S. sanctions (Khan among them) to 11. ■ The I.C.C. was established to serve the post–1945 order for which the United Nations and its Charter have stood as marble pillars these past eight decades. Has the United States, in subverting the Court’s chief prosecutor, just dealt a severe blow to this order? Did the columns just buckle? I do not like the question because I do not like the answer. I will let John Whitbeck, the international attorney, furnish the reply:
Whitbeck’s point is mine. Lawlessness in the name of law is my term for our circumstance in the third decade of the 21st century (and the second year of the Trump II presidency). Karim Khan’s fate appears to render the Court a hollow shell, a ghost of itself—still there, rendered powerless to discharge its responsibilities. This is a bitter recognition to share. More questions I do not like to pose—these bearing on our present crises. Is the invasion of Gaza effectively legal in that, given what we can expect of Khan’s replacement, no one will be charged, tried, and convicted of any crime? Has genocide just become a sovereign power’s legitimate prerogative because it is not punishable? The Palestinians of Gaza will be forcibly removed at some not-distant point, and New York landlords can stage a festival of greed atop the bones of those who did not survive, and this will be marked down as good business? There is talk in mainstream media, and I gather in some quarters of the State Department, that when Trump threatens to bomb civilian targets in Iran he is threatening war crimes, but this looks to me like sheer ritual now (if ever it was anything other): No one in the Trump regime or the U.S. military will ever be held to account for such operations. In a perverse bit of timing, the Zionist military announced a major new offensive in the West Bank Friday, the same day as the U.N. vote, ostensibly in response to an incident in which a Palestinian killed two Israelis—and I insist on my “ostensibly.” Itamar Ben–Givr, the stomach-turning ultra–Zionist in the Netanyahu cabinet, immediately called for a Gaza-like bombing operation across the West Bank. It is an open incitement to crimes against humanity, but this very plainly does not and will not in the future matter. Parenthetically, it is interesting to note that Karim Khan was brought down by way of unproven, never-to-be-substantiated sexual innuendo. I think of Julian Assange; I think of Graham Platner, the progressive Mainer just forced out of a race for a Senate seat. I think of the disgusting wave of hasbara rubbish—all discredited—of sexual violence after Hamas’s 7 October invasion of southern Israel. And now Khan. No, the Israelis did not invent this kind of degenerate subterfuge, but they most certainly have a preference for it. In the bargain, we are now treated to the spectacle of a serial sex offender, in the person of Donald Trump, destroying the professional life of a self-evidently principled prosecutor. Yes, our orderly Western world. The warrants the I.C.C. issued two years ago remain pending; Khan intends to appeal the Court’s decision to remove him. But the fate of international law does not appear promising at this moment, so severe a blow is Khan’s removal from office as I read it. What has befallen him—the important point—belongs to all of us and, so, will return to haunt us one or another way. The disorder into which the West descends is our disorder, however long it takes to come down our driveways. It is the same disorder—there is no real distinction—the Trump regime imposes at home. We, we Americans, know so little of the world as it is out beyond our lawns and parking lots because we are not meant to know much of it. The invisibility of our decline into lawlessness and a consequent state of disorder is by design. We cannot see the world we live in—this the very centerpiece of the design. But the world only seems far away, it is best we understand. Our decline just drew a great deal closer, our descent swifter. © 2026 Patrick Lawrence |