By Ibrahim Sorie Yillah *
On 24 July, the Assembly of States Parties to the Rome Statute voted to remove Karim Khan as Prosecutor of the International Criminal Court. The vote followed eighteen months of inquiries with more than 180 civil society organisations warning that the process had gone wrong, and a legal opinion from a senior English barrister cautioning that it risked being unlawful.
It appears what it did not follow, at any point, was a trial.
This is an attempt to trace what happened from a review of open source materials. A three-judge panel — a South African constitutional judge, a Belgian judge, and a Jamaican judge — spent nearly three months examining the findings of the UN’s own investigators. In March, they reported, unanimously, that those findings did not amount to misconduct. That should have been close to the end of the story. Instead, within weeks, the Assembly’s twenty-one-member Bureau voted to set the panel’s conclusion aside, reached a different account of what had happened, suspended Mr Khan, and sent the matter to the full Assembly for a vote. No hearing. No cross-examination. No published opinion explaining where three judges, applying the Court’s own legal standard, had gone wrong. Just a secret ballot — first of twenty-one Ambassadors, then of a hundred and twenty-five .
Contrast that with how mature democracies handle the removal of their own senior officers. When Kenya’s National Assembly moved to impeach Deputy President Rigathi Gachagua in 2024, the matter went to the Senate for what was explicitly styled a trial: live witnesses, cross-examination by the Deputy President’s own counsel, two full days set aside for that cross-examination alone, before a vote. When the US Senate tried President Trump, House-appointed managers argued the case in person, before the body that would go on to vote, with the Chief Justice presiding. Neither process is a perfect model — the Kenyan hearing was itself found, on judicial review, to have infringed the Deputy President’s rights on one point — but both had an actual evidentiary contest before an actual vote. The ICC’s own chief prosecutor got neither the trial Kenya gave its Deputy President nor the double judicial lock the Rome Statute itself gives to ICC judges, who cannot be removed at all unless their fellow judges recommend it by a two-thirds vote first. He got a panel whose unanimous finding could simply be shelved by the body that appointed it.
None of this happened in a political vacuum. The proceedings against Mr Khan unfolded alongside American sanctions on ICC judges and staff, explicit threats from Washington to dismantle the Court, and the still-raw controversy over Mr Khan’s own decision to seek arrest warrants against Israel’s prime minister and former defence minister. That context does not prove any state voted in bad faith. But it means a process already this thin cannot claim the benefit of the doubt.
This matters well beyond one prosecutor’s career. Article 42 of the Rome Statute promises the Office of the Prosecutor independence from outside interference. Security of tenure — the assurance that you cannot be removed except through a scrupulously fair process — is what makes that promise real rather than decorative. Every future ICC prosecutor weighing whether to investigate the nationals of a powerful state now knows something concrete: a large enough coalition of states can engineer removal, judicial safeguards notwithstanding, without ever having to explain, in writing, why those safeguards were wrong. That is the precise chilling effect Article 42 exists to prevent, and the Court has just demonstrated it to the world in real time.
None of this requires reopening the underlying allegations, which this piece does not attempt to adjudicate — that was already done, at length, by investigators and three judges. Nor does fixing it require rewriting the Rome Statute. The Assembly could commit to publishing a reasoned decision, grounded in law, whenever it overrides its own judicial panel. It could guarantee the officer under scrutiny a genuine hearing before the body that actually decides his fate, not just before the Bureau that refers the case. It could adopt something closer to the Kenyan or American model — a designated body that hears the evidence directly and explains its reasoning, rather than voting on a record it never examined.
An institution whose entire purpose is to tell the world that even the gravest accusations deserve a fair hearing before an impartial tribunal cannot extend a lesser courtesy to its own chief prosecutor. Whatever else the removal of Karim Khan settles, it has not settled that — and the independence promised to the next prosecutor is only as real as the process used to remove the last one.
*Ibrahim Sorie Yillah esq is A Member of the Sierra Leone Bar, A Former Trial Lawyer, Office of the Prosecutor, ICC, Former Defence Co-Counsel, ICC, Outgoing Member, Trust Fund For the Benefit of Victims, ICC, Principal Defender, Residual Special Court for Sierra Leone, A Tutor in International Criminal Law, Sierra Leone Law School. The views expressed in this article are solely those of the Author
