On April 11, 2002, diplomats gathered at U.N. headquarters in New York to celebrate the final ratifications that would bring the Rome Statute, the treaty that established the International Criminal Court, into force less than three months later. One seat, however, remained empty. It belonged to the United States.
Watching from the gallery was Benjamin Ferencz, an American lawyer and the last surviving Nuremberg prosecutor, who had spent decades campaigning for a permanent international criminal court. He was ashamed that the country that had brought Nazi war criminals to justice had chosen to boycott the celebration. So he slipped into the vacant chair beneath the United States’ nameplate and flashed a V-for-victory sign before quietly returning to the gallery as soon as the meeting was called to order. “I did not relish the idea of giving my opponents a ‘photo-op’ of a former Nuremberg prosecutor being led out of a UN chamber in chains,” he later recalled.
This week, on July 24, representatives of the ICC’s 125 member states will gather again at U.N. headquarters in New York, returning nearly a quarter-century after its founding for another defining moment in the institution’s history: to decide whether to remove Karim Khan as chief prosecutor. The proceedings come six weeks after the steering committee of the court’s oversight body suspended Khan in response to allegations of sexual misconduct made against him by two women. Just days ago, one of the women, a lawyer who worked directly for Khan as an ICC staffer, spoke publicly about her allegations for the first time in an on-camera interview with CNN’s Christiane Amanpour. The other woman, who had worked with Khan earlier in his career, also spoke with Amanpour but her face was hidden. Khan denies the allegations.
Regardless of the outcome of the vote, many of the larger questions raised about the viability of the ICC during Khan’s five-year tenure will doubtless remain unresolved. The greater challenge for its member states is determining how an institution created at the height of post-Cold War optimism should navigate a profoundly different international order.
That challenge has become more urgent in recent days. Last week, U.S. Secretary of State Marco Rubio declared in a Wall Street Journal op-ed that the United States would seek to dismantle the ICC “brick by brick,” while the State Department announced a “whole-of-government response” to systematically disable the court’s ability to operate.
The Trump administration’s assault on the court did not emerge in a vacuum. It followed years of mounting confrontation over the court’s assertion of jurisdiction beyond the borders of its member states, beginning with the 2020 decision to pursue an investigation into alleged U.S. war crimes in Afghanistan and culminating in the 2024 arrest warrants for Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and former Defense Minister Yoav Gallant, along with Mohammed Deif, the now-deceased commander of Hamas’ military wing.
Since the White House blacklisted Khan in February, the Office of the Prosecutor has operated under unprecedented pressure. The sanctions extend beyond Khan to other court officials, including two deputy prosecutors and eight judges, barring them from entering the United States, restricting access to the U.S. financial system and disrupting access to everyday technology services, including Microsoft Outlook email accounts and Amazon’s Alexa.
This is a far cry from the vision that animated champions of international justice like Ferencz and the court’s founders. The Rome Statute was negotiated between 1994 and 1998, at the height of what historians now call the post-Cold War liberal order. Francis Fukuyama had made the case for the “end of history,” and governments drafted the treaty in the confidence that law and multilateral institutions would gradually displace great-power rivalry. In a 1998 speech, U.N. Secretary-General Kofi Annan called the court “a gift of hope to future generations.”
The greater challenge for ICC member states is determining how an institution created at the height of post-Cold War optimism should navigate a profoundly different international order.
Today, that optimism has given way to renewed geopolitical competition, resurgent authoritarianism and open challenges to the authority of international institutions. For most of the court’s life the revisionist threat came from powers like Russia that never accepted the order the ICC belongs to. Washington is now behaving like one of them. But the court also faces a reckoning from within.
Some of the court’s limitations were built into its design. It has no police force and cannot execute its own arrest warrants, protect witnesses or compel governments to produce evidence. It depends on states to perform those functions, including states whose political and economic interests may conflict with their obligations under the Rome Statute. That dependence was laid bare in September 2024, when Russian President Vladimir Putin received a ceremonial welcome in Mongolia even though the country is a member of the court and was obligated to arrest him under a warrant issued the previous year. The court subsequently found that Mongolia had failed to cooperate and referred the matter to the Assembly of States Parties, but it had no means of enforcing the warrant itself.
The same constraints shape the court’s investigative work. Its prosecutors are expected to investigate mass atrocities committed across sprawling conflict zones, often years after the events in question, with limited access to crime scenes, vulnerable witnesses and evidence held by uncooperative governments. Its resources, meanwhile, are finite. Every new investigation forces choices about which countries, incidents and alleged perpetrators to prioritize, leaving the court vulnerable to charges of selection bias.
Those structural disadvantages, however, do not fully account for the court’s patchy record. After more than two decades of operation, its judges have issued 13 convictions and four acquittals, a modest return for an institution with worldwide ambitions and a mandate covering genocide, crimes against humanity, war crimes and aggression. Numerous cases have collapsed because suspects remained beyond the court’s reach, witnesses recanted or disappeared, and prosecutors failed to assemble evidence capable of surviving judicial scrutiny.
By 2020, concern over the court’s performance had prompted member states to commission an Independent Expert Review led by former South African judge Richard Goldstone. Its final report identified weaknesses in governance, investigations, prosecution strategy and judicial management, while also describing a workplace culture marked by distrust, bullying, harassment and low morale.
The review therefore exposed a central tension that predates the current controversy. The court demands accountability from governments and military leaders around the world, yet it has struggled to establish effective systems of accountability inside its own institution.
ICC member states will vote Friday on whether to remove Khan as chief prosecutor. But whatever they decide, it will be unlikely to restore the confidence in multilateralism that prevailed when the court was conceived or reverse the political headwinds facing international justice in an age of geopolitical fragmentation. War itself has grown in scale and spread since the court’s founding. According to the Armed Conflict Location and Event Data project, political violence has nearly doubled worldwide since 2020, with more than 200,000 conflict events and over 240,000 reported fatalities in the past year. Armed groups have proliferated, conflicts have become more geographically diffuse, and civilians are increasingly caught in the violence.
Khan’s future will be settled with the vote. Whether the court can withstand a great power bent on its destruction, and a crisis of confidence in its own ranks, is the question that outlasts it.
Candace Rondeaux is a professor with the Future Security Initiative at Arizona State University and a non-resident senior fellow with the Global Security program at New America.