The International Criminal Court's governing body voted to fire the chief prosecutor who sought arrest warrants for Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, a decision that undercuts the legal foundation New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani used to threaten arresting a foreign leader on American soil.
Karim Khan became the first chief prosecutor in ICC history to be removed from office after 82 of the court's 125 member states voted to oust him for what the court's oversight body called "serious misconduct and serious breach of duty." The charges stem from allegations of nonconsensual sexual conduct with a junior female staffer in his office, allegations Khan has denied since they first surfaced.
The vote came after a drawn-out disciplinary process that spanned more than a year. Khan stepped aside in May 2025 while the U.N. Office of Internal Oversight Services investigated the claims. He was formally suspended in June 2026. And on Friday, the Assembly of States Parties, the ICC's governing body, based in The Hague, ended his tenure for good.
The speed of the final act caught even Khan's own legal team off guard. The New York Post reported that Sierra Leone introduced a motion that would have made it harder to remove Khan, but the measure failed early in the session, accelerating the vote by several hours.
Khan's lawyer, Tayab Ali, a partner at the London-based firm Bindmans LLP, rejected the outcome in blunt terms. He said Khan was blocked from addressing the session and never received a fair hearing.
AP News reported Ali's statement that the removal "was determined by a process in which he was never given a fair opportunity to be heard, and in defiance of the conclusions of the independent judges who examined the full evidential record."
Ali also claimed that a three-judge ICC panel had unanimously determined in March 2026 that the factual findings from the U.N. investigation "did not establish misconduct or breach of duty by Khan." He said the U.N. oversight report itself contained "not a single finding of misconduct, including sexual misconduct." Ali added that more than 180 nongovernmental organizations and senior international lawyers had raised due process concerns about the proceedings.
Khan's legal team said he would "challenge the lawfulness and fairness of the decision through all available legal mechanisms." Ali characterized the removal as an "executive vote" taken "while under sanctions and while the Court is under immense political pressure."
The woman at the center of the allegations, identified publicly only as Sarah, went public in a CNN interview shortly before the vote. She described the dynamic between a chief prosecutor and a junior aide in terms that left little room for ambiguity.
As she told CNN:
"There is no way for something to be consensual when you have such a power disparity."
Khan has denied the allegations from the outset. His legal team has framed the entire process as politically motivated, driven, in their telling, by governments hostile to the ICC's work.
But Israeli officials offered a sharply different reading. Danny Danon, Israel's ambassador to the United Nations, told Fox News Digital that Khan's pursuit of Netanyahu was itself an act of deflection, an attempt to shield himself from accountability by picking a high-profile geopolitical fight.
"Karim Khan believed that by launching a political witch hunt against Israel and issuing a politically-motivated arrest warrant against Prime Minister Netanyahu, the world would ignore the grave sexual misconduct allegations against him. He was wrong."
Danon went further, tying the fallout to New York City's mayor. "The attacks against Israel, which were intended to distract from his disgraceful conduct, did not save Karim Khan," he said, "and they will not help Zohran Mamdani either."
The ICC issued arrest warrants for Netanyahu and former Israeli Defense Minister Yoav Gallant in November 2024, at Khan's request. Both warrants arose from the court's investigation into Israel's military operations in Gaza. Israel is not a member of the ICC and has rejected the court's jurisdiction. The United States, also not a member, condemned the warrants as well.
The court has not said whether Khan's removal affects the legal standing of those warrants. That silence leaves a significant question hanging over the ICC's credibility. Anne Bayefsky, president of Human Rights Voices and director of the Touro Institute on Human Rights and the Holocaust, argued to Fox News Digital that the damage runs deeper than one man's misconduct.
Bayefsky said Khan "unexpectedly requested arrest warrants for Israel's prime minister and defense minister within weeks of discovering his sexual deviancy had been revealed." She added that Khan "accused his victim of being a Mossad agent" and that "he and his lawyers constantly repeated the refrain that Israelis were behind the accusations."
She challenged the notion that the ICC's work product could be cleanly separated from the prosecutor who built it:
"Now there is a massive campaign to save the ICC from Khan. On this logic, Khan's anti-Israel fanaticism never tainted his investigation of Israel, his arrest warrant request against Israelis, his submissions to the ICC Court, the evidence he placed before the Court, or the analysis and conclusions of the ICC Court that placed their trust in him when they decided to grant his warrant requests."
Few American politicians leaned as heavily on the ICC warrants as Zohran Mamdani. During his campaign for New York City mayor, Mamdani repeatedly invoked the ICC case against Netanyahu and said he would seek to arrest the Israeli prime minister if Netanyahu set foot in New York. The pledge became a signature issue, one that drew sharp criticism and a direct rebuke from the federal government.
Once in office, Mamdani acknowledged what legal scholars had pointed out all along: New York City lacks the authority to enforce an ICC warrant. He shifted to calling on the federal government to act, a request that went nowhere. President Trump publicly guaranteed that Netanyahu would not face arrest on American soil.
Mamdani's broader record in office has drawn scrutiny on multiple fronts. He stayed silent for hours after suspected antisemitic stabbings while posting about housing taxes. He drew backlash from Jewish leaders after calling AIPAC supporters "monsters" at a Brooklyn rally. And a 12-block homeless encampment spread across Manhattan as his administration stalled on enforcement.
Khan's removal does not erase the ICC warrants from the books, at least not yet. But it strips away whatever moral authority Mamdani and other warrant advocates claimed when they cited the court's judgment as grounds for action against a sitting allied head of state.
Days before the Assembly of States Parties cast its vote, Secretary of State Marco Rubio launched a broader U.S. campaign aimed at the ICC itself, accusing the court of threatening American sovereignty. The specific actions Rubio has taken beyond that characterization were not detailed, but the timing placed Washington's posture toward the court in sharp relief just as the institution's own members were preparing to remove its top official.
The ICC was created under the Rome Statute to prosecute individuals accused of genocide, war crimes, crimes against humanity, and the crime of aggression, but only when national courts are unable or unwilling to act. Neither the United States nor Israel has ratified the treaty, and both governments have long questioned the court's reach. Khan's lawyers argued that the removal itself was shaped by that political pressure, calling it an "executive vote" carried out while the court operated under sanctions.
Whether Khan's legal challenge succeeds or fails, the institution he led now faces a credibility problem it cannot vote away. Its most consequential recent act, the warrants that made headlines worldwide and fueled a New York mayor's campaign, was the work of a prosecutor removed for serious misconduct before his term was up.
An institution that cannot police its own chief prosecutor has no business issuing warrants for the leaders of sovereign nations.
