Mouin Rabbani
The New Arab / May 21, 2025
Beyond the allegations, Karim Khan’s failure to prosecute Israel at ICC is a dereliction of duty — one he is, without doubt, guilty of, says Mouin Rabbani.
Karim Khan, the Prosecutor of the International Criminal Court (ICC), is on administrative leave pending the conclusion of an investigation that features extremely serious allegations of sexual misconduct and abuse of authority against him. While the decision was taken by Khan, it remains unclear if he jumped or was pushed, although it has been reported he faced a rebellion from his staff and ICC officials demanding he step aside.
It was recently reported that the timing of Khan’s 2024 applications to the ICC Pre-Trial Chamber (PTC) for arrest warrants against two Israeli and three Hamas leaders was determined by Khan’s efforts to divert attention from the allegations swirling around him. That Khan engaged in a scheme to nip the case against him in the bud, and abused his office to serve his personal interests, is certainly a plausible scenario.
Israel and its flunkies have seized upon this reporting to claim that it definitively proves that the entire case against Prime Minister Netanyahu and former Defense Minister Yoav Gallant is a sham, the result of nothing more than the personal corruption of the ICC’s Prosecutor. In fact, it proves the exact opposite.
As noted previously, Khan was elected to his office in 2021, in no small part thanks to energetic lobbying on his behalf by not only his own government, that of Great Britain, but also of two states that are not ICC members, the United States and Israel.
They viewed him as the safest bet among the available candidates to ensure that ICC investigations into various crimes committed by Israel, and in Afghanistan by various parties, including the US, would never conclude.
Israel’s man in the ICC
Khan repaid his debt at the first opportunity. While briefing the United Nations Security Council shortly after his installation, he repeatedly informed its members that his office would prioritise investigations into violations of the Rome Statute referred to his office by the Security Council over investigations initiated by other mechanisms, and all but explicitly committed to shutting other cases down.
The agenda presented by Khan was an anything but subtle reference to the ICC investigations into Afghanistan and Palestine, neither of which had been initiated in response to a referral to the ICC by the Security Council, where any such proposal would have been promptly vetoed by Washington.
For the following year Khan proved a reliable pair of hands and true to his word. If the investigations into US conduct in Afghanistan and that of Israel in Palestine did indeed continue, they did so at a pace which, by comparison, made snails appear supersonic.
Khan’s hand was ultimately forced by circumstances beyond his control. In February 2022 Russia invaded Ukraine, and encouraged by his Western sponsors, his office immediately launched an investigation, even though the case had not been referred to him by the Security Council, where it would have been vetoed by Russia. In early 2023 the ICC issued an arrest warrant for none other than the Russian head of state, Vladimir Putin.
In other words, as of February 2022 Khan no longer had an excuse – if he indeed ever had one – to not seriously investigate what is known as the Situation in Palestine. But until October 2023, nothing is precisely what he continued to do.
Dragging his feet
The key evidence for this assessment is that the ICC investigation comprises all violations of the Rome Statute dating back to 2014, including the war crime of illegal settlement, the crime against humanity of apartheid, and Israel’s previous onslaughts against the Gaza Strip, most notably its 2014 Operation Protective Edge. Yet the July 2024 arrest warrants refer solely to crimes committed as of October 7 2023.
Second, the unprecedented scale of Israel’s genocidal military campaign in the Gaza Strip made it impossible for Khan to ignore it, even as he made a point of issuing more indictments of Palestinian leaders on account of the 7 October 2023 attacks in southern Israel.
Third, Khan was coming under unprecedented pressure from members of the ICC Assembly of States Parties (ICC member governments), the human rights community, and his own peers, including many from Great Britain.
Fourth, after the International Court of Justice (ICJ) in January 2024 decided to grant South Africa a full hearing on its complaint that Israel was violating its obligations under the 1948 Genocide Convention, conceding that South Africa had presented a plausible case, it would have destroyed what remained of the ICC’s already severely compromised legitimacy and credibility to continue doing nothing.
Finally, persistent reports that Khan was coming under sustained pressure from his own staff and others within the ICC to stop dragging his feet made his position increasingly untenable. Many in the Court take their professional and legal obligations very seriously, and this presented a growing challenge for Khan.
Khan held the fort for Israel as long as he could. The plausible reports that the timing of his applications for arrest warrants were determined by the extremely serious allegations against him, must also be measured against the confirmed evidence, widely reported in 2024, that Israel has engaged in a campaign of espionage, intimidation, blackmail and bribery of ICC officials.
Khan’s case, in other words, proves that his ability to determine the timing of his applications for arrest warrants in mid-2024 was possible only because he had been shirking his obligations and inexcusably delaying the process during the preceding several years.
Just as importantly, the arrest warrants were not issued by Khan. Rather, they were issued by the Pre-Trial Chamber, a three-judge panel, after consideration of the evidence presented by the Prosecutor. The Chamber not only found the evidence sufficiently compelling, but given the pressures that Israel surely deployed against its members, found the evidence so overwhelmingly persuasive that they concluded issuing the arrest warrants was the only choice available to them.
By Khan taking leave rather than resigning, the ICC is now without a chief prosecutor, and his duties will be discharged by two of his deputies. If and how this affects the work of the Court, positively or negatively, remains to be seen.
Regarding the sordid allegations against Khan, everyone is entitled to a presumption of innocence. But as for his dereliction of duty with respect to the investigation of the Situation in Palestine, Khan confirmed his guilt long before these latest allegations forced him out.
Mouin Rabbani is Co-Editor of Jadaliyya and a Non-Resident Fellow at the Center for Conflict and Humanitarian Studies
