Why ICC prosecutor Karim Khan was suspended - and what could happen next
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Imran Mulla
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Tue, 06/09/2026 - 11:36
The court's executive body has disregarded the findings of a judicial panel which cleared Khan of misconduct allegations
ICC Chief Prosecutor Karim Khan, attends a United Nations Security Council meeting on Sudan and South Sudan in New York on 27 January 2025 (AFP)
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The International Criminal Court is in an unprecedented state of limbo.
Its chief prosecutor, Karim Khan, has been suspended amid a campaign to remove him from office.
Member states of the bureau of the Assembly of State Parties (ASP), the ICC's executive body, voted to suspend Khan on Monday after ignoring the outcome of a United Nations investigation into sexual misconduct allegations against Khan - an investigation which they had themselves commissioned.
The judges appointed to review its findings cleared the prosecutor earlier this year, concluding that there was no evidence of wrongdoing.
But the ASP bureau opted to take the highly unconventional step of disregarding the findings and making their own assessment of the investigation instead.
Khan has already been on leave for over a year. He is sanctioned by the United States over his pursuit of arrest warrants for Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and his former defence minister, Yoav Gallant.
His two deputies and numerous judges have also been sanctioned.
Last month, in an interview with Middle East Eye, Khan described the extraordinary intimidation and pressure he said he had faced in connection with his pursuit of arrest warrants for Israeli ministers - including threats made by former British foreign secretary David Cameron and US Senator Lindsey Graham.
He accused 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.
While the ASP bureau is an executive committee made up of 21 members, all 125 member states of the ICC are represented on the court's governing body, the ASP.
It is these member states who will ultimately vote on Khan's fate.
If the bureau's finding of serious misconduct is upheld in a vote by at least two-thirds of members, the ASP would hold a second vote to remove the prosecutor.
So how did it get to this stage?
Investigation into Israeli war crimes
Khan is a British barrister who formerly served as an assistant secretary-general of the United Nations. He has also worked as a defence lawyer in domestic and itnernational criminal tribunals.
He was elected in February 2021 by the ASP as the ICC’s chief prosecutor, becoming the third person to hold that position since the court’s founding in 2002.
Khan served as the first special adviser and head of the UN investigative team to promote accountability for crimes committed by the Islamic State (IS) group in Iraq between 2018 to 2021.
He was elected as ICC chief prosecutor in 2021 and his office has since investigated serious international crimes allegedly committed by state leaders from across the world, including seeking arrest warrants for Myanmar’s junta leaders and Taliban officials in Afghanistan.
After seeking an arrest warrant for Russian President Vladimir Putin following his invasion of Ukraine, Khan was sanctioned by Russia.
The criminal investigation into alleged war crimes in the occupied Palestinian territories had been launched just months before Khan took office by his predecessor, Fatou Bensouda, a former Gambian justice minister who is now her country’s ambassador in London.
The Guardian revealed in 2024 that Mossad had pressured and allegedly threatened Bensouda in a years-long failed campaign to stop her from opening the investigation, and then placed her successor, Khan, under surveillance.
Pressure on Khan started to build in April 2024, as he prepared to apply for arrest warrants for Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and his then-defence minister, Yoav Gallant, for alleged war crimes, and again in October 2024, a month before the ICC judges issued the warrants.
In May 2024 Khan sought the arrest warrants, which the court then issued that November.
MEE reported last August that pressure on the prosecutor during this period 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.
Khan told MEE last month he had received information he was under close surveillance by Russian and Israeli intelligence agencies and had informed the authorities.
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He confirmed that US Senator Lindsey Graham threatened him with sanctions if he applied for the warrants, which MEE had previously reported.
"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 then-British Foreign Secretary David 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 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".
Sexual misconduct allegations
In 2025, with Donald Trump as US president, Khan was hit with sanctions.
The sanctions were later expanded to target two deputy prosecutors and eight ICC judges involved in the Palestine and Afghanistan investigations, the UN special rapporteur on Palestine, as well as Palestinian NGOs that provided evidence to the court.
Referring to the growing pressures faced by the court since Trump returned to office in January 2025, Khan said: “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."
At the same time, the court was wracked with scandal over sexual misconduct allegations against Khan - which he has always denied.
It was on 29 April 2024, over a month after the decision to apply for warrants for Netanyahu and Gallant was made, that one of Khan’s staff made harassment allegations against him.
The harassment allegations were referred to the court’s Internal Oversight Mechanism (IOM), its investigative body, on 3 May, but an investigation closed days later, after the woman said she did not want to cooperate.
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Another IOM investigation into the allegations was opened and closed later that year, before an external UN investigation began.
Khan told MEE last month he had not been afforded anonymity while the complaint against him was investigated, as had been other court officials previously facing misconduct allegations.
His name had been confirmed to the media by the president of the bureau in late 2024.
Pressure on the prosecutor intensified further in early 2025 as Khan was reported to be seeking warrants for more Israeli ministers, and coincided with further media leaks about the sexual misconduct allegations. The Trump administration sanctioned Khan in February that year.
Khan then went on leave in mid-May, shortly after an attempt to suspend him, prompted by a senior member of his own office, failed, and amid the UN investigation into the misconduct allegations.
In March a panel of judges appointed by the ASP concluded that the investigation had not established any "misconduct or breach of duty" by Khan.
But a majority of ASP bureau members then backed a motion to disregard the judges' report and make their own assessment of the investigation.
'Uncharted territory'
MEE understands that the prosecutor submitted evidence to the ASP last month from Ben Swanson, a former assistant secretary-general of the UN's Organisation of Internal Oversight Mechanism (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."
Khan warned last month that the 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 said that if the ASP sought to remove him, he would appeal to the International Labour Organization Administrative Tribunal (ILOAT), the body to which ICC staff may appeal employment decisions.
In a legal opinion shared with ICC member states last month, Abdul Koroma, a former International Court of Justice (ICJ) judge, said that the ICC could be ordered by the ILOAT to reinstate Khan and pay up to €1.5m ($1.74m) in compensation if the court's governing body removed or sanctioned him.
Norway’s deputy foreign minister, Andreas Kravik, told MEE last week that the ASP bureau should “respect the procedures” it had put in place to examine misconduct allegations against the prosecutor.
"What we have said is that the ICC needs to look at this case in conformity with the procedures that have been established for examining such allegations of misconduct,” Kravik said.
He warned that "otherwise, there will be at least a perception of politicisation of the process. And that would hurt the integrity of the court.
“That's something that we cannot afford, especially in this time when the court is under real pressure by other states and where certain states are trying, at the best of their ability, to portray the court as a politicised entity not operating in conformity with core principles of international law.”
Now Khan has been suspended, the ASP bureau has said it has decided to convene a special session of the ASP as soon as possible to consider the matter.
ICC states should respect judges' report on prosecutor, says Norway’s deputy foreign minister
»
“The assessment of the Bureau was based on the report of an investigation undertaken by the United Nations Office of Internal Oversight Services (OIOS), the underlying evidence, the advice of an ad hoc Panel of judicial experts, and written submissions,” it said.
“The decision of the Bureau and the related documentation will remain confidential. The Bureau continues to call for due respect for the privacy and the rights of all parties concerned, as well as for the integrity of the ongoing process,” the statement added.
According to ASP rules, any finding of misconduct would require a two-thirds majority of the member states present and voting at the ASP.
If the ASP votes to find serious misconduct, it would then hold a second vote on whether to remove the prosecutor.
In that vote, an absolute majority of at least 63 votes would be required to remove Khan.
Khan's legal team said on Monday: "The decision is unlawful, procedurally unfair and unsupported by evidence.
"It disregards the unanimous conclusion of the independent Judicial Panel appointed by the Bureau itself, which found that the factual findings by OIOS did not establish misconduct or breach of duty under the relevant legal framework."
They said they would "take all necessary steps to challenge the decision, protect his rights, and ensure that due process is upheld."
Now Khan's future - along with that that of the ICC itself - hangs in the balance.
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