The International Criminal Court has suspended its chief prosecutor, Karim Khan, with immediate effect after an investigation found evidence he engaged in nonconsensual sexual contact with a female aide. The ICC's governing body referred Khan for formal disciplinary proceedings and handed the final decision on his future to the court's 125 member states, who will cast their votes by secret ballot.
The suspension marks an unprecedented crisis for the Hague-based court, which had to create new procedural rules on the fly just to handle the case. It also lands squarely on a prosecutor who spent the last two years pursuing some of the most politically charged warrants in the ICC's history, including arrest warrants against Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and former Defense Minister Yoav Gallant.
The UN Office of Internal Oversight Services conducted a lengthy probe into Khan's conduct. That investigation, as AP News reported, found evidence of "nonconsensual sexual contact" in Khan's office, at his private residence, and while he was on mission. The Bureau of the Assembly of States Parties determined that Khan, a 56-year-old British barrister, committed "serious misconduct" and a "serious breach of duty."
A three-judge panel that reviewed the evidence found the investigation was "not conclusive enough," but the suspension proceeded anyway. The Bureau stated that the suspension "is not an indication of the final outcome." Khan's lawyers called the ruling "unlawful, procedurally unfair and unsupported by evidence," according to Breitbart.
The Assembly of States Parties will now vote on Khan's fate. That vote, conducted by secret ballot among the ICC's 125 member states, will determine whether he is permanently removed from his post or reinstated.
The misconduct allegations did not surface in a vacuum. They emerged around the same time Khan was escalating his pursuit of Israeli leaders, and the overlapping timeline has drawn intense scrutiny from critics who believe the two tracks are connected.
The New York Post, citing a Wall Street Journal investigation, reported that Khan allegedly pressured the complainant to drop her sexual assault allegations by linking them to his work on the Israeli arrest warrants. Khan allegedly told the woman, "Think about the Palestinian arrest warrants," when urging her to stay silent.
In another exchange detailed by the Journal, Khan allegedly told the complainant:
"The casualties will unfortunately be three: You and your family, me and my family and the justice of the victims."
When confronted about the allegations, Khan reportedly suggested he might need to resign but then reversed course, saying, "But then people will think I'm running away from Palestine." The UN investigation expanded to examine not only the sexual misconduct claims but also whether Khan attempted to intimidate the complainant and witnesses.
The sequence of events in May 2024 sharpened the suspicion. Khan abruptly canceled a planned visit to Israel and Gaza on May 19. The very next day, he announced arrest warrant applications against Netanyahu and Gallant. Senior prosecutors within the ICC had recommended against that course of action, the Post reported.
Questions about prosecutorial integrity in high-profile criminal cases are hardly new, but the allegation that a chief prosecutor weaponized his own caseload to silence a misconduct complaint would represent a breach of a different magnitude entirely.
Israeli officials wasted no time connecting the suspension to the warrants Khan obtained against their leaders. Netanyahu posted bluntly on X:
"The ICC is corrupt to the core."
In an interview with Breitbart News, Netanyahu went further, framing the warrant applications as a calculated move to deflect from the sexual misconduct probe. "So he decided the best way to get out of that was to hit the Jews, or hit the Prime Minister of the Jewish state," Netanyahu said.
Israeli UN Ambassador Danny Danon echoed the sentiment in sharper terms. "The ICC's decision to immediately suspend the Chief Prosecutor proves that this body is rotten to the core," Danon said. "Now is the time to cancel the absurd indictments against Prime Minister Netanyahu!"
Khan had sought the warrants in May 2024 and obtained them in November 2024, as Fox News detailed. The warrants targeted both Netanyahu and Gallant over alleged war crimes connected to the conflict in Gaza. Fox News reported that the scandal has drawn reactions from both Israeli officials and the U.S. government, with critics arguing it undermines the court's credibility and the legal standing of its cases against the Israeli leaders.
The ICC was designed to hold the world's most powerful figures accountable for atrocities. That mission now collides with the reality that the court's own top prosecutor stands accused of committing a serious crime against a subordinate, then allegedly leveraging his office to cover it up.
The procedural chaos tells its own story. The court had no existing mechanism to discipline its chief prosecutor. Officials had to draft new rules as the investigation unfolded, a fact Courthouse News Service highlighted in its reporting on the suspension. For an institution that lectures sovereign nations on the rule of law, the absence of basic internal safeguards is difficult to explain away.
The three-judge panel's finding that the evidence was "not conclusive enough" adds another layer of uncertainty. Khan's legal team will almost certainly press that point as the Assembly of States Parties prepares its vote. Whether 125 member states, many with their own complicated relationships with the court, will muster the political will to permanently remove a sitting prosecutor remains an open question.
Authorities have not publicly confirmed whether criminal charges will follow the disciplinary process. The UN investigation examined both the underlying sexual misconduct and the alleged witness intimidation, but no criminal referral has been announced. Investigators will need to determine whether the evidence supports prosecution in a national jurisdiction, since the ICC itself does not have authority to try its own officials for personal crimes.
When the conduct of legal officials becomes the story itself, as seen in cases like the reassignment of the judge in the Alex Murdaugh retrial, the institutional damage often outlasts the individual case. The ICC faces that risk now on a global stage.
Khan is suspended from all duties while the Assembly of States Parties prepares its vote. The timeline for that vote has not been publicly announced. In the interim, the ICC's ongoing cases, including the Netanyahu and Gallant warrants, remain legally active but operationally leaderless at the top.
The secret ballot format means the public may never know how individual member states voted. That opacity could shield governments from diplomatic blowback but will do nothing to restore confidence in a court already battered by credibility questions from Washington, Jerusalem, and several African capitals that have openly challenged its authority.
A court that cannot hold its own prosecutor accountable in plain view will have a hard time convincing anyone it should hold the rest of the world accountable at all.
