Karim Khan Ousted as International Criminal Court's Chief Prosecutor Over Sexual Abuse Claims

Karim Khan has been removed from his position as chief prosecutor of the International Criminal Court (ICC) following a vote by its governing body, which found him guilty of serious misconduct related to sexual abuse allegations made by a former staff member.

Chief prosecutor of International Criminal Court, Karim Khan is out. The International Criminal Court’s governing body voted Friday to strip the British barrister of his role as chief prosecutor, ending a saga that started two years ago with sexual abuse allegations from a former staffer. It’s the first time anything like this has happened at the court, per The Guardian.

The vote itself happened behind closed doors at UN headquarters in New York. Of the court’s 125 member states, 82 backed removing Khan. Thirteen pushed back and voted no. Eleven sat it out and abstained.

Khan hasn’t budged on his denials. Not once. His lawyers say the whole disciplinary process was stacked against him from the start, and after Friday’s vote they made clear he isn’t done fighting. Expect legal challenges questioning whether the removal was even lawful.

Two decisions in particular put him on the map: going after arrest warrants for Vladimir Putin and, later, Benjamin Netanyahu. Both moves dragged the ICC into confrontations with two of the world’s most powerful governments, and both drew intense global attention to a court that often struggles for relevance.

Those warrants still stand, by the way. Judges issued them independently, so Khan’s ouster changes nothing there. But the prosecution office he ran, some 400 people, has taken a beating over the course of this scandal.

Friday’s meeting drew on three separate sources of evidence: the executive committee’s own findings, a report from a UN watchdog that investigated the claims, and a legal review carried out by a panel of judges.

The governing body looked into it and found nothing. Its report states plainly that no evidence backs the idea that the accuser was working on behalf of outside parties, intelligence agencies included.

The woman at the center of it all addressed this herself last week, sitting down with CNN’s Christiane Amanpour. Her message was simple: she filed the complaint because of what was done to her, full stop, not because someone put her up to it.