The chattering classes at the Hague are clutching their pearls. Another prosecutor bites the dust, another high-profile exit, another round of hand-wringing over institutional stability. The standard narrative is predictable. Pundits claim the removal of International Criminal Court prosecutor Karim Khan spells institutional doom. They argue that leadership churn paralyzes investigations, signals weakness to rogue states, and leaves victims high and dry.
It is a comfortable lie.
The lazy consensus treats the ICC like a sacred temple that must never have its roof leak, even if the foundation is rotting. I have watched international organizations burn millions of euros on bureaucratic self-preservation while delivering precisely zero structural deterrence. Khan’s exit is not a crisis of legitimacy. It is an overdue detonation of a failing model.
Stop mourning the office holder. Start examining the structural illusion.
The Myth of the Omnipotent Prosecutor
Every time a new prosecutor takes the helm at the ICC, the media buys into a juvenile fairy tale. They frame the individual as a lone crusader riding into the badlands to lasso warlords and depose dictators. This narrative is financially convenient for the court and intellectually bankrupt for anyone who understands realpolitik.
The prosecutor does not wield an army. The prosecutor relies entirely on voluntary state cooperation—a polite diplomatic term for begging powerful nations to enforce warrants they mostly ignore when it suits their national security interests.
When Khan targeted high-profile figures across deeply polarized conflicts, the establishment panicked not because international law was failing, but because the illusion of universal jurisdiction was colliding with reality. The office was designed to look busy while remaining functionally impotent against superpowers and their allies. Khan attempted to push the boundaries of that mandate, and the system did what systemic antibodies always do. It rejected the foreign body.
Blaming his departure for the court's institutional paralysis is like blaming the thermometer for a fever. The court was already sick.
Follow the Incentives Not the Mandates
Let us look at the actual mechanics of international tribunals. The incentive structure of the ICC rewards procedural expansion over actual impact. Investigators rack up frequent flyer miles, issue arrest warrants that serve as expensive travel restrictions for indicted officials, and produce thousands of pages of reports that gather digital dust.
Success is measured by the sheer volume of paperwork and the number of preliminary examinations opened. Actual convictions? Rare, expensive, and painfully slow.
Imagine a corporation where the legal department spent a decade investigating minor infractions while the core business model imploded, yet the executives demanded a bigger budget based on the number of press releases issued. You would fire the board. Yet in international law, we call this justice and demand more funding.
Khan departure exposes the fundamental flaw of trying to run a global criminal court on moral posturing and a shoestring budget. The court tries to be everything to everyone—a human rights NGO, a global police force, and a diplomatic tribunal—while lacking the teeth for any of them.
The Brutal Truth About Global Enforcement
The uncomfortable reality that nobody in the diplomatic corps wants to admit is that international criminal law is political theater with legal stationery.
When a state has a nuclear arsenal or controls vital global supply chains, warrants from the Hague are politely ignored. When a state is weak, isolated, and politically expendable, the court swoops in to demonstrate its relevance. This is not justice. This is selective accountability masquerading as universal morality.
Does this mean we should scrap international tribunals entirely? Absolutely not. But we must stop pretending that changing the prosecutor changes the structural imbalance of international power.
The alternative approach requires radical downsizing and strategic focus. Instead of pretending to police the entire globe, the ICC should function as a backstop for functional regional courts, stepping in only when local judiciaries genuinely collapse and major powers share a rare consensus to back enforcement.
Right now, the court spreads its resources so thin across impossible geopolitical fault lines that it achieves structural gridlock.
The Downside of My Approach
Let us be completely transparent about the cost of this contrarian view. Trimming the mandate and admitting the political limits of international courts means accepting that many atrocities will go unpunished by the Hague. It means letting go of the comforting fiction that a piece of paper signed by international bureaucrats can stop a tank column or deter a determined despot.
That is a bitter pill for human rights advocates who prefer the warm glow of moral outrage to the cold calculations of strategy. But keeping the current charade alive only breeds deeper cynicism among the populations the court claims to protect.
Karim Khan departure is a clean break from a broken playbook. If the court has any chance of long-term survival, it will stop looking for a messiah to lead its existing bureaucracy and start dismantling the institutional hubris that made his exit inevitable.
The next time a prosecutor leaves under a cloud of controversy, do not ask how the court will survive. Ask why we ever expected a court built on diplomatic fiction to dispense universal truth.
