Scandal in the ICC?

The Observer Daily: scandal inside the ICC

You may have seen the latest in Donald Trump’s war on the International Criminal Court. In an unprecedented move, four ICC judges were sanctioned – a retaliation over the war tribunal’s arrest warrant for the Israeli prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, and its decision to open a case into alleged war crimes by US troops in Afghanistan. But this is not the only trouble facing the ICC. In a new investigation, Observer reporter Chloe Hadjimatheou reports new details of the serious allegations against the court’s chief prosecutor, Karim Khan. She writes: “The man tasked since 2021 with trying the most serious human rights abuses in the world had been accused of molesting a woman in his office […] The woman had confided to colleagues that for almost a year, Khan, 55, had been allegedly molesting her in his office and engaging in non-consensual sex with her in hotel rooms during work trips abroad. A friend of hers says that she recounted how she ‘would just lie there. One time [she] even pretended to be asleep’.” It is perhaps the most vulnerable moment for the court since it was established in 2002. Read Chloe’s extraordinary report in full here.