On April 11, 2002, diplomats gathered at U.N. headquarters in New York to celebrate the final ratifications that would bring the Rome Statute, the treaty that established the International Criminal Court, into force less than three months later. One seat, however, remained empty. It belonged to the United States.
Watching from the gallery was Benjamin Ferencz, an American lawyer and the last surviving Nuremberg prosecutor, who had spent decades campaigning for a permanent international criminal court. He was ashamed that the country that had brought Nazi war criminals to justice had chosen to boycott the celebration. So he slipped into the vacant chair beneath the United States’ nameplate and flashed a V-for-victory sign before quietly returning to the gallery as soon as the meeting was called to order. “I did not relish the idea of giving my opponents a ‘photo-op’ of a former Nuremberg prosecutor being led out of a UN chamber in chains,” he later recalled.
This week, on July 24, representatives of the ICC’s 125 member states will gather again at U.N. headquarters in New York, returning nearly a quarter-century after its founding for another defining moment in the institution’s history: to decide whether to remove Karim Khan as chief prosecutor. The proceedings come six weeks after the steering committee of the court’s oversight body suspended Khan in response to allegations of sexual misconduct made against him by two women. Just days ago, one of the women, a lawyer who worked directly for Khan as an ICC staffer, spoke publicly about her allegations for the first time in an on-camera interview with CNN’s Christiane Amanpour. The other woman, who had worked with Khan earlier in his career, also spoke with Amanpour but her face was hidden. Khan denies the allegations.