THE HAGUE ON TRIAL

Political intrigue—and a lurid scandal—rocks the International Criminal Court.

- BY DAVID D. KIRKPATRICK

The International Criminal Court, established in 2002, in the aftermath of the carnage in Rwanda and the Balkans, was designed to hold accountable future perpetrators of war crimes or crimes against humanity. It got off to a slow start: during the court’s first two decades in operation, it issued fewer than forty public arrest warrants. Most targeted African strongmen or warlords; the court almost never took on the major international powers or their closest allies, and critics complained that it effectively punished the weak while sparing the strong. (A hundred and twenty-five states are party to a treaty recognizing the court, but the United States, Russia, China, and Israel aren’t among them.) The court is governed by an assembly of the participating states, and in 2021 it elected a new chief prosecutor, Karim Khan. A fifty-five-year-old British-born lawyer whose father emigrated from Pakistan, he had previously served as an Assistant Secretary-General of the United Nations, where he’d overseen a team investigating abuses committed by ISIS. Khan vowed to reënergize the I.C.C. by upholding its promise of equal justice for all.

Khan boasted to colleagues that, in his first three years on the job, he had obtained more than forty new warrants, some not yet public. Among the public warrants were orders for the arrest of Vladimir Putin and top Russian military leaders, for war crimes in Ukraine; the leaders of Hamas, for its murderous attack on Israel on October 7, 2023; and the Israeli Prime Minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, and a former Defense Minister, Yoav Gallant, for the willful killing of civilians in Gaza, and for employing the denial of food as a weapon of war.