Exclusive: ICC prosecutor Karim Khan details 'dangerous' attempt by states to remove him

“Exclusive: ICC prosecutor Karim Khan details 'dangerous' attempt by states to remove him Submitted by David Hearst on Thu, 05/07/2026 - 17:02 British chief prosecutor criticises members of ICC governing body’s bureau in exclusive interview with MEE ICC Chief Prosecutor Karim Khan accuses members of the court's governing body of waging a 'dangerous"'and biased campaign to remove him from office. (Middle East Eye) On The chief prosecutor of the International Criminal Court has accused members of the court's governing body of waging a "dangerous" and biased campaign to remove him from office over unfounded sexual misconduct allegations and his investigation into alleged Israeli war crimes. Speaking exclusively to Middle East Eye, Karim Khan described the extraordinary intimidation and pressure he said he had faced in connection with his pursuit of arrest warrants for Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and his former defence minister - including threats made by former British foreign secretary David Cameron and US Senator Lindsey Graham. He accused members of the bureau of the Assembly of State Parties (ASP) of subverting basic legal principles by ignoring the outcome of a United Nations investigation into the misconduct allegations - which they had commissioned - when judges appointed to review its findings concluded there was no evidence of wrongdoing. Khan said he had not been afforded anonymity while the complaint against him was investigated, as other court officials previously facing misconduct allegations had been, after his name was confirmed to the media by the president of the bureau. “Why am I treated so differently?” he asked. He warned that the ongoing campaign against him had pitched the court into “unchartered territory” which he said risked creating a dangerous precedent for removing elected officials through political pressure. “If a process can be suborned, if it can be subverted, if it can be undermined, because state appointees and diplomats, for whatever reason, think they know better, then this is a template for getting rid of any elected official, now or in the future, on spurious or flimsy or fabricated or unfounded grounds,” Khan told MEE. Khan has been on indefinite leave for almost a year pending the outcome of the investigation into allegations which he has strenuously denied. In March, MEE reported that a panel of judges appointed by the ASP bureau to review the investigation by the UN's Office of Internal Oversight Services (OIOS) had concluded there was no evidence of "misconduct or breach of duty" by Khan. But the prosecutor has still not returned to his duties after a group of disproportionately western and European states voted at a bureau meeting to disregard the panel of judges and re-investigate the case. Throughout the investigation, Khan kept his silence. Now he has decided to go public. Speaking to MEE earlier this week, the prosecutor criticised the president of the bureau, Finnish diplomat Paivi Kaukoranta, for revealing to the press that he was being investigated for sexual misconduct. He accused one of the ASP’s two vice presidents of meeting with his accuser “out of any matters of due process”. Khan said he had applied for three members of the bureau to be disqualified from the process that will decide his fate, accusing them of bias. He added that one of the three had recused themself - but that the bureau had refused to disqualify the other two. He did not disclose the identities of the three members. The bureau has invited fresh submissions and is revisiting the evidence. Khan made a formal submission on Friday expressing concerns regarding the integrity of its process. “It's uncharted territory”, he told MEE. “It's never happened before that somebody who's been subject to an investigation has had his name revealed, because I'm not the first elected official to be investigated.” Exclusive: Staff in Karim Khan's office write in support of his return to ICC Read More » Judges and prosecutors who had previously been investigated, he said, benefited from “all the rights of confidentiality”. In October 2024, the Mail on Sunday reported that Kaukoranta, the ASP president, had confirmed in a statement that allegations had been made against Khan. The ASP subsequently published the same statement on its website. That “breached the obligations of confidentiality”, Khan said. He added: “I believe the vice president had a meeting with the complainant out of any matters of due process.” Last October MEE reported that Margareta Kassangana, a Polish diplomat serving as a vice president of the ASP, met the woman who made the complaint against Khan to discuss the case prior to the decision by the ASP’s leadership bureau to outsource the investigation to the UN. Khan told MEE: “I did seek the recusal of three individuals. One voluntarily recused themselves. In relation to the two others, I then filed an application to the bureau to disqualify them on a number of different grounds. “The bureau, in a short decision, rejected that. But I had concerns, my lawyers had concerns. We made an application that there was a real apprehension of bias, for reasons that we gave.” Attempt to remove the prosecutor MEE understands that the prosecutor has now submitted evidence from Ben Swanson, a former assistant secretary-general of the UN’s OIOS, the body that investigated Khan. Swanson left his role in February 2025, meaning his time in the position overlapped with the investigation into Khan, which began in late 2024. Swanson said: “Neither the OIOS Investigation Report, nor the underlying material, provide sufficient evidence to support any finding of misconduct to the requisite standard of proof.” But how does Khan respond to claims that the standard of proof - beyond reasonable doubt - was too high for a workplace harassment case? Khan said it was the ASP's bureau which had set that standard. “The standard that the judges applied is the standard given to them by the political bureau,” he told MEE. “It is a standard that is applied to every staff member, every elected official throughout the court's history.” Asked to describe his relationship with the ICC staff member who accused him of sexual harassment, Khan said he has always dealt with people "professionally and appropriately". "I maintain I've done so, and this is why from the very outset, at the time I was informed of the allegations, I denied them completely," he said. "I've denied them ever since, and I'm very pleased that three independent judges have come to the same conclusion, that looking at the evidence, looking at the report, there was no misconduct or breach of authority by me." The bureau, he said, “can't simply reject a unanimous finding of judges because they want to get rid of me, or because they think they know better… it would be very dangerous just to sideline the judges because they don't like the conclusion of the judges that they appointed.” Khan said he was unsure what would happen next within the bureau. “I don't think there's a unity of views. We have seen, for example, the first time there was a decision not by consensus. What's been reported at least is that a number of countries were against this new further stage. They thought it should be closed and the bureau as a whole should follow the judges.” The 125 member states of the ICC are represented on the ASP, but the ASP bureau is an executive committee made up of 21 members. MEE has reported that the states on the bureau which voted to disregard the panel of judges were Belgium; Bolivia; Brazil; Chile; Cyprus; Ecuador; Finland; Italy; Japan; Latvia; New Zealand; Poland; Slovenia; South Korea; and Switzerland. If the bureau makes a finding of serious misconduct, member states of the ICC will be called upon to vote on the prosecutor’s removal. If they removed him, Khan said, he would appeal to the International Labour Organisation Appeals Tribunal to examine whether the process was fair. Khan argued that the bureau’s process “seems to be moving from legality to political considerations”. “Generally, I assume good faith. I think most states want to do the right thing, unless there's some countervailing incentive or pressure that I don't know about.” 'It was meant to eviscerate my reputation' The investigation into Khan has unfolded against the backdrop of an intensifying intimidation campaign targeting the prosecutor and the ICC itself over his office's efforts to bring Gaza war crimes prosecutions against Israeli leaders. In May 2024 he sought arrest warrants for Netanyahu and his then defence minister Yoav Gallant. The court issued the warrants that November. Since then Khan, his two deputies and a number of judges have been subjected to US sanctions. Last May, Khan went on leave. “I didn't speak to anybody from the press at all” while the investigation was ongoing, he said. But was keeping silent the right strategy? “I'm not sure if it was the right strategy. I think it was the correct strategy,” Khan reflected. “I'm an officer of the court. There's a process. I can't very well talk about breaches of confidentiality if I'm briefing the press.” Khan is speaking publicly now, he explained, because the UN investigation is over. He conceded that “a lot of harm was done to me by this parallel media campaign. It was meant to eviscerate my reputation and to cause division in the office, to prejudice decision makers, and I hope that plan, that strategy does not succeed". MEE reported last August that pressure on the prosecutor involved threats and warnings directed at Khan by prominent politicians; close colleagues and family friends briefing against him; fears for his safety, prompted by a Mossad team's presence in The Hague, and media leaks about the sexual misconduct allegations. Exclusive: How Karim Khan’s Israel war crimes probe was derailed by threats, leaks and sex claims Read More » Khan told MEE he had received information he was under close surveillance by Russian and Israeli intelligence agencies and had informed the authorities but could not comment further. “I'm not trained in counter-espionage. I haven't seen somebody trailing me. I wouldn't know,” he said. He confirmed that US Senator Graham threatened him with sanctions if he applied for the warrants. “It was quite a cordial conversation until the point where he said, ‘If you do what I've heard you're going to do, there'll be certain consequences.’” He also described his conversation on 23 April 2024 with Cameron, who threatened Khan with the UK's withdrawal from and defunding of the ICC if the court pursued arrest warrants for Israeli officials. The phone call was first reported by MEE in June last year. Khan said Cameron, a former prime minister who is now a peer in the House of Lords, had told him “that I'd lost the plot, or I'd be thought to have lost the plot if we went forward [with the warrants] in the way that he had heard. "There were a number of questions that were posed, and consequences were, or likely consequences, were conveyed to me in what was a difficult conversation." Khan added: “Clearly, he was unhappy with what he had heard and that it was going to cause difficulties from his perspective. “And, you know, I was left in no doubt that, of course, the UK is one of the biggest funders of the court, and the United Kingdom, his [Conservative] party, the governing party at the time, as he put it, and also the United States, may think that I would lose the dressing room, in the political dressing room. That would lead to some difficulties. “And of course he was right.” The prosecutor would not say whether he thought there should be an investigation into the call. The British foreign office has repeatedly refused to comment on the matter. “Others must decide what, if anything, to do,” Khan said. However, he confirmed that if the Foreign Affairs Select Committee held an inquiry into the phone call and asked him to give evidence, “of course I would consider it and cooperate.” 'We need these structures' Khan further gave his thoughts on the purpose and work of the ICC as it has been forced to operate in an increasingly hostile environment. Referring to the growing pressures faced by the court since US President Donald Trump returned to office in January 2025, Khan said: “I think I was the first person sanctioned. I was the guinea pig in February [2025] by President Trump as he came in. And then in August, the deputies were sanctioned. “And then later on, some of the Palestinian NGOs and people like Francesca Albanese, special rapporteur. The United States, of course, did it to hurt, it did it to dissuade, to ensure compliance with their preferred option, which is no investigations in Palestine .” 'Do they want their children to live in a world governed by brute power or a world regulated by law?' - ICC Chief Prosecutor Karim Khan Khan is not the first chief prosecutor to attract the ire of Washington. His predecessor, Fatou Bensouda , and another court official, were also placed on the US sanctions list in 2020 during Trump’s first administration over an investigation into alleged US war crimes in Afghanistan, though they were delisted during Joe Biden’s presidency. Khan believes “there is a fortitude in the judges, in the institution, and amongst many staff that will realise… that it's not about us, it's about the victims. And so we keep going forward.” He argued that “we need these structures that are under attack. We need the ICJ [the International Court of Justice], we need the ICC, we need the United Nations. “And there is a concerted attempt in some quarters, I think, to erode confidence in these structures, in these institutions, because they may, from one vantage point, be viewed as an impediment to power. “And that's exactly why we need them.” But does Khan believe that a rules-based international order actually still exists? “Well, it's a nice thought, isn't it?” he replied. “The question is, has it ever existed? I think the truth of the matter is we are, as humanity, a work in progress in every sense: science, technology, education, law.” Khan conceded that “we're not in a world of universal application. We're not even in a world of universal compliance with the countries that have signed up to the statute. He said that institutions such as the ICC, which has been criticised by some for focusing primarily on investigating and prosecuting crimes against humanity committed in Africa, and western leaders are facing scrutiny in countries in the Global South sceptical that platitudes about the rule of law are being applied equally. But he said these were not reasons to give up on the ideal of an international system of justice. “It's an argument that should marshal us to do better,” he said, “and for people around the world to make a very personal decision. “Do they want their children to live in a world governed by brute power or a world regulated by law?” Justice, Khan argued, “is too important to leave to the lawyers. It's too important to leave to the prosecutor of the ICC, or even to the judges of the ICC. “Everybody should say they've got a stake in justice, whether they're affected or they're not.” International law Imran Mulla News Post Date Override 0 Update Date Mon, 05/04/2020 - 21:19 Update Date Override 0

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