Later this week, on 24 July, the International Criminal Court’s ‘Assembly of States Parties’ will convene in New York for an emergency session. In early June, the ASP Bureau (a 21-member executive committee) voted to hold such a session after finding that the Court’s Chief Prosecutor, Karim Khan, had committed “serious misconduct”. The full Assembly must now vote on whether to remove Khan from his position – a decision which requires an absolute majority (at least 63 votes from the ASP’s 125 States Parties).
Allegations that Khan had sexually harassed a junior colleague surfaced publicly in October 2024, and since then the Prosecutor’s Office at the ICC has faced a growing legitimacy crisis. In May 2025, Khan took ‘administrative leave’ and left the stewardship of the Office to his two deputies, Mame Mandiaye Niang, and Nazhat Shameem Khan. Last month, he was doubly suspended: by the ASP Bureau, pending the upcoming emergency meeting, and by the Standards Board of the United Kingdom. Khan wholeheartedly denies the allegations against him.
Khan is the ICC’s third chief prosecutor, elected in February 2021. He was preceded by Fatou Bensouda (2012-2021) and Luis Moreno-Ocampo (2003-2012). While he is the first to face the reckoning of a suspension by the ASP Bureau, and a potential removal from his position, he is not the first to produce serious allegations of misconduct, arising before, during, or after their time in office.
Bensouda faced allegations in 2018, during the course of the Truth, Reconciliation and Reparations Commission for The Gambia, stemming from long before her time as Chief Prosecutor. Under the military dictatorship of Yahya Jammeh in The Gambia, from 1994 to 2017, she had spent six years as a prosecutor, Solicitor General, Attorney General, and Minister of Justice. Bensouda insisted that she had no knowledge of torture, disappearances, or illegal detentions, and that the accusations against her were designed to bring her into “disrepute”. In 2017, damning media allegations emerged about Moreno-Ocampo: that he had engaged in prosecutorial, financial, and managerial misconduct during and after his time in the Court’s top role. Already in 2006, Moreno-Ocampo had also faced his own allegations of sexual misconduct. Nothing public or consequential came out of the court’s internal investigations in this case. Khan’s alleged misconduct, though the first to precipitate an emergency session of the ASP, is not an aberration.
How to judge the doorkeeper of international justice?
I spend a lot of time reading, writing, talking, and thinking about international criminal trials, from an historian’s perspective. One issue which raises its head the most often – particularly with students – is the ‘structure versus agency’, or ‘context versus individualism’ question. I teach MA students about the Rwandan genocide, for example, and then about the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda, set up to try individuals who participated in that genocide. Inevitably, we spend most of our discussion time teasing out the issues with the law’s insistence on the supremacy of individual agency, and the contrast with the contextual and structural complexity of mass violence situations. A few years ago, a usually quiet student tentatively raised their hand and asked: ‘So does a criminal create a genocide, or do genocides produce criminals’? Oddly enough, in the build-up to Khan’s reckoning at the emergency ASP session, I found myself wondering something similar about the position of ICC Chief Prosecutor: does the position encourage misconduct, or are those inclined to such conduct more likely to take on the position?
The Chief Prosecutor of the International Criminal Court is, in many ways, the face, the doorkeeper of international criminal law, and international justice. As a position held by a single individual, it simultaneously combines immense symbolic and moral power with intense political and legal constraints, and pressure. Should we be surprised, then, to hear tales of Moreno-Ocampo shouting at one of his senior legal advisers: “For you, I am the law!”? Can one person be the driver of international criminal prosecutions, the repository of global expectations, and the scapegoat for any instance of impunity, without beginning to consider themselves above reproach, above recrimination, or as a justice-warrior for whom any criticism is simply another attempt to halt their noble quest? Is the ‘workplace culture’ of the Chief Prosecutor of the world’s only permanent international criminal court inevitably a breeding ground for misconduct? Or does the title itself attract those who already think of themselves as being unimpeachable, by nature of the fact that they are ‘fighting the good fight’, for the ultimate good cause? Perhaps it’s both. How to judge the doorkeeper of international justice? A Kafkaesque question with, unsurprisingly, no easy answers.
Whether the ASP votes, on Friday, to remove Khan or not, how might the election process of Chief Prosecutors be improved? Or is the solution to tackle the culture that the Chief Prosecutor walks into? Would the Court be best served by going ‘Roman Republic-style’, and having joint-Chief Prosecutors, and avoiding the potential emergence of Justice-Caesars? Does the ASP – many of whose members have been so silent, or passive, in the face of pressure, threats, and intimidation by the USA and the Mossad – have the political will to negotiate and vote through changes at a Court that is in such desperate need of an overhaul?
This article offers more questions than answers. I’ll admit that I struggled immensely to write it. I felt it important, in many ways, to draw attention to the upcoming ASP session, and to what may be the most consequential non-trial decision in the ICC’s recent history, and for the Court’s immediate future. I also felt it important to reflect on the quandary of the very position of ICC Chief Prosecutor, and the fact that it seems to have been a magnet for misconduct already within the Court’s young life. Article 42(3) of the Rome Statute announces that the Prosecutor and the Deputy Prosecutors “shall be persons of high moral character”. No matter the outcome of this week’s vote, the headlines surely write themselves. There is too much irony to this whole situation. And yet, I struggled primarily because in spite of the need for intense scrutiny of this process, and indeed of Khan, the Court is also so much more than its Chief Prosecutor.
The challenge for any post-Khan prosecutor
The ICC, as an institution, is made up of individuals. Some, like Karim Khan, seem to have abused their power and position to harm and intimidate others. Others like Luis Moreno-Ocampo, seem to have abused their reputation for financial gain or, like Fatou Bensouda, to gloss over a dubious past. Others still, consider this flawed institution to be “one of the most significant achievements of human civilisation”. It is maddening. But it is also surely devastating for those who work at the court – as lawyers, advisors, judges, translators, registry, assistants, interns, security, outreach, and a myriad of other positions that those of us ‘on the outside’ probably would struggle to keep track of. Some have – as in the case of the Khan allegations – been afraid to report serious misconduct for fear of jeopardising the work of the Court. Others argue cases at trial, dealing with the most horrific violence, and then have to ask journalists not to report their names, out of fear of US sanctions. Even more work on temporary contracts, or as unpaid interns.
In advance of the upcoming session in New York, the ‘ICC Staff Union’ put out a statement addressing the 125 States Parties of the Court, highlighting that the investigation into the allegations against Khan, “and the seriousness of the allegations are having a significant impact on the Court, its reputation, and on staff morale”. US Secretary of State Marco Rubio has just announced his campaign to dismantle the ICC. The Court no doubt faces fresh rounds of pressure, expectations, and scrutiny with the recent announcements of the planned opening of the trial of former President of the Philippines Rodrigo Duterte, and the apparent ‘breakthrough’ of investigations into atrocities in Sudan. In this context, the ASP decisions on Khan’s conduct, and his future at the Court, might put an end to one set of questions, but will surely open others: including how any post-Khan-prosecutor can survive today’s violent and polarised geopolitics, as well as the complicated and seemingly less-than-moral inherited legacies of their predecessors.
Lucy J. Gaynor is PhD Researcher at University of Amsterdam and NIOD Institute for War, Holocaust, and Genocide Studies, examining the construction of historical narratives within international criminal trials.
