In a landmark and unprecedented move that has sent shockwaves through international legal circles, 82 out of 125 member states of the International Criminal Court (ICC) voted in a secret ballot at a special New York session to remove sitting chief prosecutor Karim Khan from office over unproven misconduct allegations. This marks the first time in the court’s history that an incumbent chief prosecutor has been dismissed, and the move has already sparked fierce debate over its political motivations.
Francesca Albanese, the United Nations Special Rapporteur on the Occupied Palestinian Territories, has publicly connected Khan’s removal to a coordinated global campaign to invalidate the ICC’s arrest warrant for Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu over alleged war crimes in the Gaza Strip. Writing on the social platform X on Saturday, Albanese emphasized that Khan’s ousting lines up perfectly with efforts to neutralize the outstanding arrest warrant, arguing that coincidence is not an acceptable explanation in the framework of modern international law. She added that the effort to remove Khan proves that accountability mechanisms genuinely threaten the apartheid regime in Israel and its allies, and called on legal practitioners and judicial bodies across the globe to step up their work for justice if the ICC itself is weakened by political pressure.
Albanese’s remarks were made in direct response to an Israeli media report alleging that Israeli Foreign Minister Gideon Saar led an intensive diplomatic campaign and oversaw a dedicated task force to push for Khan’s removal from his post. This effort began shortly after Khan made the landmark decision in May 2024 to seek arrest warrants for Netanyahu and former Israeli Defense Minister Yoav Gallant over their roles in alleged war crimes in Gaza. The move immediately unleashed a widespread campaign of threats and economic sanctions against Khan and other ICC officials who supported the court’s investigation into potential crimes in Palestinian territories.
This is not the first time Albanese has warned of a coordinated push to oust Khan. Earlier this year, after a panel of three independent judicial experts appointed by the ICC’s own oversight body unanimously cleared Khan of all misconduct allegations—finding that evidence from UN investigators failed to prove any breach of duty or professional misconduct—the Bureau of the Assembly of States Parties, an executive body of 21 diplomats, voted to set aside the panel’s clearing. In an additional move first revealed by Middle East Eye, the bureau altered voting rules ahead of the final dismissal vote, collapsing a planned two-stage voting process into a single motion and lowering the threshold required to remove Khan from office. Albanese warned back in March that despite the judicial clearing, the so-called pro-apartheid camp would still push for Khan’s removal, and called on supporters of international justice to block the attempt.
Pressure against ICC officials has intensified steadily since the announcement of the arrest warrants, with the United States imposing sanctions on multiple ICC representatives. The Donald Trump administration placed sanctions on Albanese in July 2025, just days after she published a report naming more than 60 companies that she argued were profiting from Israel’s ongoing occupation of Palestinian territories. Khan became the first ICC official to be sanctioned under the same executive order in February 2025, and by the end of last year, 11 ICC officials—including both deputy prosecutors and multiple judges who ruled against Israel’s position on the Gaza investigation—had been targeted with sanctions. Currently, the two acting heads of the prosecutor’s office, Nazhat Shameem Khan and Mame Mandiaye Niang, were also sanctioned by the U.S. in August under the same executive order.
The arrest warrants for Netanyahu and Gallant remain active, as only ICC judges have the authority to withdraw them. Israel, which is not a state party to the ICC’s founding Rome Statute, has repeatedly called for the warrants to be scrapped and has launched multiple legal challenges to invalidate them, two of which are still pending before the court. Before Khan’s dismissal was officially confirmed, Saar repeated Israel’s long-debunked claim that the warrants were rushed and issued only to distract from the misconduct allegations against Khan, writing on X that “These warrants, issued against a country that is not even a member of the ICC, should never have been sought in the first place and should be revoked immediately.”
In the aftermath of the dismissal vote, the ICC Office of the Prosecutor released an official statement confirming that its work, including the investigation into potential crimes in Palestinian territories, would continue without interruption. Elections to select a new permanent chief prosecutor will be held in the coming period, though the ICC’s governing body has not yet released an official timeline for the process.