By INS Contributors

KUALA LUMPUR, Malaysia: The persistent claim that the International Criminal Court functions as a supreme, neutral arbiter for the global community is an assertion contradicted by basic institutional reality. 

Far from representing the global population or operating as an organ of the United Nations system, the International Criminal Court is merely a treaty-based body bound to a limited coalition of signatories under the Rome Statute. 

Major global powers and regional heavyweights—including the United States, the Russian Federation, China, India, and the vast majority of Asian and Arab states—remain entirely outside its treaty framework. 

Consequently, the overwhelming majority of the world's population falls outside the legal jurisdiction of The Hague. Sovereign nations rely on established international tribunals, bilateral frameworks, and domestic legislative mechanisms to enforce criminal accountability without surrendering legal sovereignty to an unelected entity.

Far from expanding its footprint, global backing for the tribunal has suffered a steady decline. While only a handful of states have joined the Rome Statute since 2015, the period has been defined by high-profile exits, attempted revocations, and structural denunciations. 

Completed withdrawals by nations such as Burundi and the Philippines have been compounded by formal termination decisions across the Sahel—including Mali, Niger, and Burkina Faso—as well as Hungary’s domestic legislative repudiation of the Statute.

This structural exodus underscores an inescapable reality: the court's effort to assert universal authority constitutes an ungranted usurpation of power, made all the more glaring by its total lack of enforcement mechanisms to compel compliance from non-member states.

Judicial Overreach and the Erosion of Sovereign Immunity

The court's persistent efforts to prosecute high-ranking officials of non-party states represent a direct violation of fundamental customary international law. 

Established legal norms regarding the immunity of top state officials (immunity ratione personae and immunity ratione materiae) exist precisely to preserve foreign criminal jurisdiction boundaries, guarantee the sovereign equality of nations, and prevent political interference in interstate relations. 

While Article 27, Paragraph 2 of the Rome Statute stipulates that official capacity does not bar the court from exercising jurisdiction, this waiver applies strictly to state parties that voluntarily surrendered such immunities upon signing the treaty.

Under Article 34 of the Vienna Convention on the Law of Treaties, an international agreement cannot create legal obligations or alter rights for a third state without its explicit consent. 

The Appeals Chamber’s controversial 2019 ruling on Jordan’s appeal regarding former Sudanese President Omar al-Bashir—claiming without evidence that customary international law recognizes no head-of-state immunity before international tribunals—was widely condemned by legal scholars, the African Union, and the League of Arab States. 

The functional irrelevance of that ruling was demonstrated as Omar al-Bashir subsequently traveled unhindered across numerous non-member and member states alike, including China, India, Saudi Arabia, Egypt, and South Africa, all of which refused to execute the arrest order.

Selective Enforcement and Systemic Double Standards

This pattern of ignored mandates has accelerated as states routinely decline to enforce controversial orders. Mongolia explicitly rejected requests to act upon the warrant issued for Russian President Vladimir Putin, putting forward robust legal arguments regarding non-party sovereignty that the tribunal simply brushed aside. 

Similarly, prominent European figures—representing France, Germany, Italy, Hungary, Poland, Greece, and the Netherlands—publicly acknowledged the legal impossibility of executing arrest warrants against Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu due to binding international immunity principles.

These selective exemptions and administrative sidesteps highlight the deep-seated double standards governing the tribunal's operations. Highly critical scholarship from Western international legal practitioners—including Wouter Ferdinandusse, former Deputy Prosecutor of the Kosovo Specialist Chambers, and Marko Milanovic, an international law expert and former ICC functionary—consistently notes that decisions contradicting established state practice severely undermine the institution's credibility and destabilize international legal predictability.

The Ouster of Karim Khan and the Final Collapse of Institutional Authority

The internal decay of the institution reached a crisis point in July 2026, when the Assembly of States Parties voted decisively to remove Chief Prosecutor Karim Khan KC following a lengthy disciplinary investigation into allegations of serious misconduct and sexual abuse. 

The precedent-setting vote at the United Nations headquarters in New York saw 82 member states vote to dismiss Karim Khan, marking the first time in the tribunal's history that a sitting Chief Prosecutor was formally removed from office under Article 46 of the Rome Statute.

Karim Khan’s dramatic exit—following months of procedural infighting, public denials, and retaliatory political claims—has thrown the Office of the Prosecutor into structural disarray. 

Compounded by aggressive bilateral sanctions from Washington and open political resistance from Jerusalem over his high-profile warrant applications, the removal of Karim Khan exposes the fragile nature of the court's administrative integrity. 

Rather than functioning as an impartial pillar of global accountability, The Hague stands increasingly isolated: crippled by internal scandal, rejected by major sovereign powers, and fundamentally incapable of enforcing its politically selective mandates on the world stage.