Karim Khan has faced obstacles virtually every time he’s tried to move forward with the Israeli war crimes case, Rachel Marsden has said
The International Criminal Court’s (ICC) chief prosecutor, Karim Khan, was slapped with sexual assault allegations shortly before seeking arrest warrants for Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and Defense Minister Yoav Gallant, raising suspicions about the timing of the accusations, columnist Rachel Marsden has told RT.
Before officially seeking the warrants, Khan reportedly informed London about his plans, only to face threats from then Foreign Secretary David Cameron that the UK would bail out of the ICC altogether if he proceeded with his plan, Marsden noted.
In April of 2024, roughly a month before the prosecutor officially sought the arrest warrants, a staffer at the ICC accused him of chronically sexually assaulting her. She complained to Thomas Lynch – an American lawyer and a close adviser at the ICC – who then alerted some internal oversight bodies within the ICC.
The US, which has never recognized the ICC’s mandate, opposed the issuance of arrest warrants for Netanyahu and Gallant from the very beginning and repeatedly threatened Khan with sanctions. Washington eventually imposed the restrictions on the court, some of its judges, and Khan personally.
The ICC closed two internal probes against Khan after the complainant declined to cooperate. The RT contributor recalled that a note about the alleged sex assault case was then leaked to the media in October of 2024, just days before the court officially issued the arrest warrants in November of 2024.
The court’s oversight body, the Assembly of States Parties, then publicly named Khan as a suspect in the sex assault case and outsourced the investigation to the UN’s Office of Internal Oversight Services – something the former ICC judges have called “completely outside of protocol that they’re aware of,” as well as “plain strange,” according to the columnist.
Khan appears to be either suffering from the worst timing possible or is “being taken out with a plot line so obvious that it wouldn’t make the first draft of a Netflix political thriller,” Marsden said.
