THE HAGUE — At the center of the case that has now toppled the world’s most prominent prosecutor is a woman who worked beside him. A United Nations investigation found evidence that Karim Khan had nonconsensual sexual contact with the aide in his office, at his private residence and while on official missions, conduct she reported and he denies. On Tuesday, more than two years after her allegations first surfaced, the institution Khan led finally acted on them.
The Bureau of the Assembly of States Parties, the court’s oversight body, referred the British barrister for disciplinary proceedings and suspended him from his duties as chief prosecutor, CNN reported. The decision strips Khan, 56, of the office he has formally held through a year of leave, and sends the final question, whether he keeps the job at all, to the full Assembly, the body of 125 member governments that oversees the court.
The mechanics of what follows are unusual by design. Only the Assembly can remove a sitting prosecutor, and doing so requires a majority in a secret ballot, 63 of the 125 member states, at a special session yet to be scheduled. The founders of the court built the threshold to protect prosecutors from political retaliation by the governments they investigate. The same protection now stands between the findings against Khan and any consequence for them.
The investigation’s findings, conducted by the UN’s internal oversight office because the court’s own mechanism was deemed too close to the prosecutor, describe a pattern rather than an incident. Beyond the contact in his office and residence, the inquiry detailed an episode on a foreign mission in which Khan allegedly asked the aide to rest with him on a hotel bed and touched her sexually, and behavior that included locking his office door, The Times of Israel noted in its account of the findings.
Khan has denied wrongdoing steadfastly and from the beginning. His lawyers answered the suspension within hours, saying he rejected the decision in the strongest terms and calling it unlawful, procedurally unfair and unsupported by evidence. He stepped aside from day-to-day duties last year as the investigation proceeded, leaving the office’s work to his deputies. Tuesday’s referral converts that informal absence into formal suspension, and converts the question of his future from an internal personnel matter into a vote among governments.
And it is the governments that make this case combustible, because Khan is not a neutral figure to them. He is the prosecutor who sought and won arrest warrants against Benjamin Netanyahu and his former defense minister over the war in Gaza, and against Vladimir Putin over the abduction of Ukrainian children. The United States sanctioned him personally in February 2025 for the Israel warrants, then broadened the measures to his deputies and a bench of the court’s judges. Among the 125 states that will now vote on his future in secret are close allies of the men he indicted and governments that have spent two years trying to shield them.
That entanglement cuts in both directions, and honesty requires saying so. Khan’s defenders have long argued that the misconduct case gathered force at moments convenient to the court’s enemies, and that destroying the prosecutor was always the cheapest way to wound the prosecutions. His critics answer that the UN’s investigators are not agents of anyone’s foreign ministry, and that the woman at the center of the case is owed a process untainted by the geopolitics swirling around her employer. Both things can be true, and the secret ballot ahead will not distinguish between governments voting on the evidence and governments voting on the warrants.
The cases themselves continue. The deputy prosecutors who have run the office since last year retain the Gaza file, where the warrants against Israel’s leadership remain in force even as Western governments sanction the settler networks the court’s investigations helped expose, and the Ukraine file, where Putin’s warrant outlasts every rumor of a deal. The institution’s defenders note, accurately, that no indictment depends on one man. Its detractors note, also accurately, that the court’s authority has rarely looked more besieged.
For Netanyahu, the timing is a gift that requires no acknowledgment. The prosecutor who put his name on a warrant is suspended in disgrace, while the prime minister himself stands trial for corruption at home and campaigns against the court abroad. Nothing about Khan’s conduct touches the evidence in the Gaza file, but politics does not run on that distinction, and Israel’s government spent Tuesday treating the suspension as vindication.
What the Assembly does next will say as much about the member states as about Khan. A swift special session and a clean vote, either way, would suggest an institution capable of holding its own officials to the standards it applies to presidents. A long delay, with the prosecutor suspended indefinitely and the office led by deputies under sanction, would suggest the paralysis the court’s enemies have worked to produce.
What remains unknown is nearly everything that matters: when the special session convenes, whether Khan resigns before it does, what the woman whose complaint started the process wants from it, and whether any of the 125 governments will say in public what they intend to do in private. The court that asks witnesses to testify against the powerful now conducts its own reckoning by secret ballot.
The warrants Khan signed will survive him or not on their own merits. The harder question, the one Tuesday’s suspension forces, is whether an institution built to judge the world’s leaders can credibly judge itself. One hundred twenty-five governments are about to answer it in writing, anonymously.
