In an interview published in part last week on his Zeteo news website and in full on his Substack Mehdi Unfiltered, the journalist Mehdi Hassan goes to the heart of the allegations against the prosecutor of the International Criminal Court (ICC) Karim Khan.
“Can you confirm today that you had no sexual relations with this woman who worked for you [and] under you?” asks Hassan.
“Well, I didn't,” answers Khan.
“You are denying the allegations of sexual misconduct from a staffer at the ICC. You're also denying that you had any kind of relationship with her?”
“Absolutely.”
It's rare for an ICC prosecutor to give an interview. The choice is strategic, linked usually to a major judicial development or an important visit to a relevant victims’ communities. Interviews are like icebergs – they reveal only a little of what is going on underneath the water, exactly because they are given by choice, at the prosecutor's discretion. But they are often the sole indicators the public has of what is happening at a major institution like the ICC and they provide an opportunity for a journalist to at least ask the relevant questions.
In this case, the decision to speak for a full hour on camera, focused on both the allegations of sexual misconduct and on how Khan approached his investigation into the alleged international crimes committed by Israeli forces in Gaza, is especially striking. This interview was succeeded by one published in Opinio Juris, a specialized website, a few days later with Khan’s counsel Sareta Ashraph. Khan is on voluntary leave from his post at the ICC. He is at the centre of a complex, little understood process of investigation at the ICC, with no official clarity provided on timelines or expectations set for its conclusion. Going public at this point suggests calculation; either this interview is designed to counter the misinformation which the prosecutor says has been circulating in the media via selected extracts from confidential reports into his conduct or – or maybe in addition – it is an attempt to influence the 21 states that make up the Bureau of the Assembly of States Parties running the process into a decision favourable to the prosecutor.
In this context, Justice Info has decided to provide key extracts from the interview, available behind a paywall, including some of the robust questions from Hassan and the detailed answers from Khan.
Complete denial
Reading the official minutes of the ICC Bureau’s meetings, the tempo of diplomatic gatherings has increased from one meeting per month to one per week in recent months and often the sole topic for discussion has been the investigation into Khan’s alleged misconduct. No details though have been made officially public on their deliberations. Ezekiel Jimenez, an academic writing on the governance of the ICC is concerned: “The unprecedented investigation into the prosecutor requires a level of public engagement we have not seen from the Bureau,” he says. And while “confidentiality must be respected”, he says “nothing bars the Bureau Presidency from factually setting up the timeline and expected outcome of their investigation. Absent this, the void is being filled by inaccurate and harmful narratives”.
What’s currently under the Bureau’s consideration are the findings of a three-judge Bureau-appointed panel that delivered its report on March 9, a summary of which was circulated to all state members of the ICC by the Bureau. Khan believes that summary is wrong: “What has happened – and that's where there has been some deliberate or negligent ambiguity – is a two-page summary which fundamentally misrepresents the findings of the UN investigation”, that worked on the case from May 2025 to January 2026. The summary, he says, is based on the evidence gathered, or the allegations against him, rather than the findings of the judges’ panel that analysed the investigation report.
There are 137 findings, he says, by the independent panel of judges. “Not one of those findings makes determinations or makes findings of conduct that could be characterised as inappropriate in any way, shape or form. So, it's as clear cut as that”, Khan says. “The judges said in their report that I denied all of the allegations. It couldn't be clearer. That's my track record. I denied in their entirety the allegations.” From the very first moment he was questioned about the allegations, he says he “completely denied engaging in any harassment, abuse authority, inappropriate behaviour whatsoever”.
Due process
Hassan presses Khan on his critique of the whole process. Khan brings up previous investigations into elected officials at the ICC suggesting that “like cases should be treated alike”. He argues: “My predecessors as prosecutors have been investigated by the ICC’s independent oversight mechanism. The judges have been investigated for different matters. Does anybody know their names? Does anybody know the details of those allegations? Why is it now? Only for Karim Khan.” The prosecutor notes that he didn’t devise the process. “This is a creation of the Bureau.”
Hassan pushes back: the judges say that the “UN investigators could not establish where the truth lies. It sounds like they're throwing their hands up saying: we're clearing Karim Khan, but we're not happy with this report we got. It didn't really adjudicate between the eyewitness testimony, what was hearsay. There were a lot of complaints from the judges.”
Khan provides a response that is not completely clear: “The judges gave a meticulously reasoned decision based upon what they were tasked to do by the Bureau. What you can't do, Mehdi, and what I won't tolerate, is you can’t keep devising a process to get to a position where the result, you know, is widely accepted by a small group of individuals.”
“People watching, who have no dog in this fight, [who] don't support the ASP bureau or Karim Khan, they look at this and they say: well, the judges cleared him, but saying there are unresolved factual disputes, [so] where does the truth lie? The UN investigators didn't do a good job. You can understand why they say ‘well, maybe there's still a cloud there’,” Hassan follows up.
“I don't accept the characterisation,” Khan responds. “It's a unanimous decision of three judges, handpicked by the bureau, for Khan. [They are] very respected judges, they know their job, they are qualified, they are experienced and they have that integrity. And their decision is that there's no misconduct or abuse of process. Now what is being proposed is for political state officials to somehow hear more representations.”
“Is that to get the result they want, maybe?”, asks Hassan.
“It's not acceptable,” says Khan. “It will be perilous to the institution at a time of massive polarisation to sideline that just because people think a perceived wisdom has been, you know, that somehow this guy is guilty, is responsible in this environment. This isn't how due process works. It's the opposite of due process,” he adds at some point.
Disclosing non-disclosure
In the interview there is no detailed discussion of what will be happening next in this long-running affair. Justice Info has previously reported that rather than making a decision that the prosecutor should respond to a finding of alleged misconduct or alleged serious misconduct, as laid out in the documents, as the next potential stage, the Bureau has instead asked Khan and the original alleged complainant to provide further submissions. Apparently, there is a strict non-disclosure agreement, because there has been no official confirmation that this is indeed what to expect by the end of this week. Neither has either camp provided the media with the full details of their latest legal submissions.
Priyanka Chirimar is counsel to the alleged complainant. She told Justice Info by email that they would “comply by the confidentiality requirements of the process” and would not “use the media to further our personal cause, to air our own grievances or attempt to influence organisational policy decisions”. On her client’s behalf, she would only say that “we find it troubling that he chose to do it. And we found everything he had to say on the subject revealing but not surprising”.
Sareta Ashraph, counsel to Khan, told Opinio Juris’s Kevin Jon Heller that “while I signed a confidentiality agreement as a condition of receiving the disclosure that bars me from discussing the evidence, I am permitted to respond to any inaccurate or misleading information placed into the public domain. I can respect those obligations while discussing the underlying evidence.”
Khan in his interview adds to his criticism of the Bureau for “breaching their own processes”. “They haven't said [that] I should respond to serious misconduct or less serious misconduct. I think they've invited submissions on whether or not there's been misconduct, which takes us back to more than a year when the UN investigators started their job. And then, of, course, we had the judges after that. So in a way, it's going back to a year ago. Why they've done that I can't speak to, but of course it wasn't unanimous,” he says.
Baloney
Hassan turns to the allegations argued in several media that the timing of the request for ICC arrest warrants against Hamas leaders and, most importantly, against Israel’s current Prime Minister and former defence minister was influenced by the emergence of the details of the alleged sexual misconduct investigation.
“Well, to use an American expression, that unfortunately is baloney,” Khan replies. He points to the timeline from when he wanted to visit Rafah, in Gaza, in October 2023, and wasn't allowed in, when he then went to Israel, to see the Kibbutzim attacked by Hamas, and to Ramallah, in the West Bank, in November 2023. “I said on Israeli television, on Palestinian television: comply now, don't complain later. I said it repeatedly.” Shortly after he appointed an independent panel of very eminent experts to review the evidence. Then, he says, “in March 2024 I told the Americans that I was going to be applying for warrants by the end of April. And then of course I spoke to the French and the British and even the Chinese. The Russians are not speaking to me.” And so the timing of the sexual affair investigation and of the arrest warrants against Israeli leaders is “completely unrelated”. At the time he applied for the warrants, he acknowledges he had been informed about an allegation and had been told that the matter was already closed.
Hassan presses Khan on reports that “the process for the warrants suddenly appeared to be ‘rushed’, and even ‘panic’”. “Of course, it's a divisive issue. Not everybody may have been in favour in the office with following the evidence,” Khan replies. He argues that he used the same legal yardstick as with Ukraine. “In fact,” he continues, “I raised the standard. The standard that we have to satisfy for the warrant are ‘reasonable grounds to believe that a crime may have been committed’. And across all my cases, I applied a higher standard, which is a realistic prospect of conviction. And nobody said that this is being rushed. It's pushed. And there is an urgency, because whether it's in Ukraine, whether it is in other situations, I have said since I became prosecutor – in fact, even before I became elected –, we're not here for people to do their PhDs. I applied for warrants in Georgia in December 2023. People had forgotten what on earth had happened in South Ossetia a decade before. So I made it a mantra that we must work at the speed of relevance.”
No genocide in Gaza?
Khan implicitly compares his approach with his predecessors as prosecutors, saying he had “to make sure the case that we put together wasn't something that would be a soundbite, with a round of applause, and then we get what we saw in the ICC's history, six out of six [prosecutions] lost in Kenya. [The process] should be capable of not only allowing warrants to be issued but to be confirmed.”
“So you wanted the case to be bulletproof before you ran it?” asks Hassan.
“Ethically and legally it should be strong and fit for purpose,” says Khan.
“Why did you give [Israel’s Prime Minister] Netanyahu a pass on what pretty much every expert now says is a genocide in Gaza?” asks Hassan later.
“Mehdi, nobody's got a pass,” responds Khan. “The law applies for all. There's no statute of limitations for war crimes or international crimes.”
“You're not ruling out that there could be a warrant in the future?”
“Everything is a function of evidence.”
“You're saying in the past three years there hasn't been evidence of genocide in Gaza?”
“It would a reckless prosecutor to move simply because of clamour. You move based upon evidence.”
“So genocide is not off limits? You haven't ruled it out?”
“No crime is off limits if the evidence is there.”
About David Cameron and Lindsey Graham
Hassan also asks Khan to confirm two previously reported incidents of western politicians attempting to apply pressure on him in response to the ICC’s investigations in Palestine. In the first one a UK official threatened to defund the ICC and leave the Rome Statute. “It's true,” confirms Khan. “I was sad, I wasn't angry,” he says, and he further confirms that it was David Cameron, then UK Foreign Secretary, and a former Prime Minister. “It was a very difficult conversation,” Khan says. “I think he was quite upset.”
Hassan asks whether Khan is concerned that other European states have declared they would not arrest Netanyahu and whether this “could destroy the credit of your court”. Khan’s response is instructive: “It's not all doom and gloom,” he says, “because people around the world in the shadow of Ukraine, are now seeing things more clearly. They see the selectivity, they see what they perceive to be double standards, that [there is] one law for them and one law for us, and they're not accepting it, not only in the global south [but also] thousands in Europe, thousands in America.”
In the second incident, Hassan asks whether U.S. Senator Lindsey Graham said in a conference call on May 1, 2024, that the ICC “is for Africans”. “He went further,” responds Khan. “He said this court is for Africa and thugs like Putin, it is not for democracies like Israel and the United States of America.”
Toxic environment
While it is still possible the Bureau will decide that there is a sufficient reason for a serious misconduct allegation against Khan to be laid which would end up with a vote on his tenure at a full meeting of 125 members of the Assembly of State Parties, Khan was also asked how it would be if he was to return to his role heading the office of the prosecutor at the ICC. Justice Info previously reported on the divided views within the ICC about Khan.
“I was elected by states,” he says. “It's important to fulfil the mandate, of course. One also needs to ensure that one can work in a harmonious way with one's colleagues. And that requires, of course, engagement. You know, there was an independent expert report in 2020 at the time of my predecessor that found that the court as a whole [and] in my office was a toxic work environment. It was riven with schisms and factions. I appointed a workplace panel. I appointed for the first time a special advisor on workplace culture. I appointed for the first time a gender focal point for the office. Of course, it's still toxic. A lot of work needs to be done.”
