Much has been written about the sexual misconduct investigation against Karim Khan, the Chief Prosecutor of the International Criminal Court. Since the Wall Street Journal and the Associated Press broke the story in late October 2024, the narrative has been pulled in every direction, except, tellingly, toward the woman at the center of it.
The facts as we know them are these: a junior staff member, a Malaysian lawyer who worked directly under Khan’s supervision, a position he selected her for, accused him of repeated nonconsensual sexual contact across multiple countries over the course of 11 months. The ICC’s governing body commissioned an external investigation by the UN Office of Internal Oversight Services (OIOS). Khan took voluntary leave in May 2025 pending its conclusion.
According to testimony and documents reviewed by the Wall Street Journal and the Associated Press, the OIOS investigation identified evidence that Khan engaged in nonconsensual sexual contact. A panel of three judges then reviewed the OIOS findings and its recommendation was that they did not meet the threshold for “misconduct or breach of duty” under the ICC’s specific legal framework. Khan has since declared himself exonerated. The case, however, remains formally open.
That is the factual record. What followed in the media, particularly from Middle East Eye and Al Jazeera, is where things get troubling.
Almost immediately after the story broke, both outlets began framing the misconduct allegations not as a workplace abuse case but as a geopolitical attack: a Mossad operation, an Israeli retaliation campaign designed to neutralise the man pursuing Netanyahu’s arrest warrant.
Both outlets made a calculated editorial choice: anchor the misconduct story inside the larger narrative of a coordinated campaign to destroy the man prosecuting Israel at the ICC. The logic was straightforward and the target audience was clear: supporters of the Palestinian cause who have watched the ICC face unprecedented political pressure, and who are primed to read any attack on Khan as an attack on accountability for Gaza.
Within that frame, the misconduct allegations did not need to be disproven. They only needed to be contextualized: placed adjacent to enough geopolitical threats that reasonable readers would draw their own conclusions about motive and credibility.
The result was that both outlets prominently reported the judges’ panel’s conclusions while consistently burying or minimizing what the UN investigation itself found.
They reported on the pressure Khan faced, but did not meaningfully report on the woman who accused him. They gave their audiences a story about a prosecutor under siege. They did not give their audiences a story about the vulnerable P2 staff member whose account, according to documents reviewed by multiple serious news organizations, described a sustained pattern of abuse by the most powerful person in her professional world.
That is a choice. And it is worth being precise about what kind of choice it is.
The most egregious example: Al Jazeera published an op-ed by Sareta Ashraph Khan’s own legal counsel, arguing the case should be closed. The question worth asking is this: why did Al Jazeera decide that the right moment to publish a lengthy argument for closing the case was while the investigation was still actively ongoing??
Ashraph is Khan’s defence counsel. She is bound by a confidentiality agreement she acknowledges in the piece, which means she had access to the full evidential record: access that no journalist or civil society organization had in any equivalent public forum. Al Jazeera handed that platform exclusively to the prosecutor’s lawyer. The complainant, a P2 staff member still employed by the ICC and bound by her own confidentiality obligations, had no column in Al Jazeera. She had no column anywhere, because, unlike Karim Khan, who is an elected official and apparently exempt from the same constraints, she would face termination for speaking to the media.
Middle East Eye has functioned throughout this case as the outlet of first choice for Khan’s team whenever there is favourable information to place in the public domain. MEE broke the story of the judges’ panel clearing Khan on March 21, 2026 ahead of any official communication from the ICC or the Bureau of the Assembly of States Parties. And here we are again: the Palestine investigation, the arrest warrants, the prosecutor as a man under siege. Because MEE, like Al Jazeera, has decided that his pursuit of the Gaza case is enough to rush to his defence, enough to clear him in the court of public opinion, enough to make the woman who accused him disappear from the story entirely.
And here is the question both outlets need to answer honestly: why is it so difficult to entertain the possibility that the ICC prosecutor may have indeed committed misconduct?
Why does his pursuit of the Palestine arrest warrants, which, let’s be clear, he was legally obligated to pursue on the evidence, not as an act of heroism, automatically render the allegations against him implausible? Here is also a fact the public is largely unaware of: Khan became ICC Prosecutor in 2021, yet took no meaningful action on the Palestine investigation for three years; an investigation that had already been opened by his predecessor, Fatou Bensouda. He issued the arrest warrants only in 2024.
The answer, I would argue, is that MEE and Al Jazeera do not understand how international organizations actually operate from the inside. And that ignorance has consequences.
What both outlets consistently failed to explain to their readers is how the OIOS actually operates. The OIOS is mandated to establish facts, supported by inculpatory and exculpatory evidence alike. It is not mandated to characterise those facts as misconduct or not. That characterization is explicitly the role of the higher authority: in this case, the three-judge panel, which is mandated to issue a recommendation.
So when Khan and his supporters point to the OIOS’s findings and claim none of them established misconduct, they are describing the OIOS doing exactly what it is mandated to do: establish facts, not reach legal conclusions. The legal recommendations were the panel’s job. And the panel’s recommendation was reached through a framework with no precedent, no existing rules, constructed specifically for this complaint. Khan himself acknowledged in his Zeteo interview that “things have been made up as you go along.” The judges did not say the conduct did not occur. They said the facts as established did not meet the legal threshold under that framework. That is not exoneration but instead is a legal characterisation and a highly specific, highly contested one: fifteen bureau states voted to disregard the panel’s findings entirely and pursue their own assessment of the evidence.
Once the panel’s recommendations became public, Khan broke his silence
In his interview with Mehdi Hasan on Zeteo on April 29, 2026, his first public appearance in nearly a year, he cited the OIOS’s 137 findings, claiming that not a single one contained a determination of conduct that could be characterised as inappropriate in any way. When Hasan pressed him directly, Khan denied any sexual relationship with the complainant flatly and any kind of relationship with her.
In that same interview, Khan made it very clear that in his view the evidence threshold for genocide in Palestine has not been met. After everything the world has witnessed in Gaza, documented, filmed, reported, livestreamed in real time for more than two years, the ICC prosecutor reached for careful, measured, lawyerly language. No crime is “off limits if the evidence is there.” The evidence, apparently, is never quite there. If he is capable of that level of precision and evasion about what Israel did in full view of the entire world, one should not be entirely surprised by the sophistication of what he has constructed in his own defense. A man who can look at Gaza and find the evidentiary bar too high is a man who knows exactly how to use legal language to avoid accountability, his own included.
Middle East Eye, which has spent months defending this prosecutor as a champion of Palestinian rights and framing his misconduct case as an Israeli plot, must now sit with that answer. The outlet that rushed to publish his exoneration narrative before any official communication, which built an entire editorial architecture around his role as the great defender of Gaza accountability, that same outlet’s protagonist just told the world, on camera, that he is not prepared to call what happened in Gaza genocide.
But to understand why the judges’ panel recommendation is not the end of this story and why the bureau states who rejected it were not acting arbitrarily, one needs to understand how the UN’s own legal framework actually treats sexual harassment cases.
The standard that applies in both the UN Dispute Tribunal and the UN Appeals Tribunal for serious misconduct cases, including sexual harassment, sexual exploitation, and abuse of authority, is “clear and convincing evidence,” which is slightly below the “beyond a reasonable doubt” threshold (a standard used for criminal cases and by ILOAT). That is a deliberately high bar, and for good reason: when termination is the likely outcome of a finding of serious misconduct, the process must be rigorous and the standard must protect against arbitrary or politically motivated decisions.
That said, the application of that standard is where cases of sexual harassment and exploitation diverge sharply from other categories of serious misconduct. In fraud, in financial misconduct, in administrative abuse: the evidence is generally documentary. There are records, transactions, paper trails, and audit findings. The facts either add up or they don’t. Sexual harassment and sexual exploitation are entirely different matters. They happen behind closed doors, in hotel rooms, on official missions, and in offices. They happen without witnesses, and they happen without witnesses precisely because that is how this category of abuse is committed. The perpetrator’s position of power ensures the victim’s silence and the absence of corroboration. Applying “beyond reasonable doubt” to a sexual harassment case as if it were a financial audit systematically advantages the perpetrator.
This is why the assessment of sexual harassment cases is not a scientific, black-and-white exercise. It requires judges to consider context, weigh the credibility of both the complainant and the alleged perpetrator, examine power dynamics, examine the pattern of behavior, and make a qualitative judgment about what the evidence as a whole establishes.
That is precisely what the UN’s own internal jurisprudence recognized in a landmark judgment in Hallal v. Secretary-General, UNDT/2011/046, paragraph 55, which was affirmed on appeal in UNAT 2012-UNAT-207. The Tribunal held explicitly that credible oral victim testimony alone may be fully sufficient to support a finding of serious misconduct in sexual harassment cases, without further corroboration being required. The Appeals Tribunal confirmed that giving full evidentiary weight to the complainant’s oral testimony, absent documentary corroboration, was not an error in law. Because the Tribunal understood something the three-judge panel in the Khan case appears to have chosen to ignore: that in sexual harassment cases, the absence of corroboration is not evidence of absence. It is simply the nature of the crime.
Put simply: The UN’s own courts have recognized that requiring documentary proof in sexual harassment cases is sometimes unrealistic and unjust. Victim testimony, when credible, is enough.
And that, it seems, is precisely what fifteen bureau states could not accept. Rather than a contextual, credibility-based assessment that the jurisprudence both permits and requires, the panel delivered what appears to have been a clean, clinical, binary application of the beyond reasonable doubt standard and declared the matter closed. The states that voted to disregard the panel’s findings and pursue their own assessment were not, as Khan and his counsel have suggested, substituting political judgment for legal judgment. They were insisting that the legal judgment actually engage with the full complexity of what sexual harassment cases demand.
Article 42(3) of the Rome Statute, the very legal instrument under which Khan holds his office, requires that the Prosecutor be a person of high moral character. That is the legal condition of his office, full stop. Whether entering into any form of relationship (coerced or otherwise) with a staff member you personally recruited, directly supervised, and over whom you held absolute professional and institutional authority constitutes a breach of that standard is not a question that requires a criminal court to answer. It does not require 5,000 pages of evidence or three months of judicial deliberation. It requires an honest reckoning with what exploitation of institutional power looks like and the courage to call it by its name.
There is one dimension of this case that has received almost no serious coverage, and it is perhaps the most telling of all.
The complainant is still an active ICC staff member. She is bound by confidentiality obligations. She cannot speak publicly, give interviews, correct the record, or respond to the sustained and well-resourced public campaign that has sought to cast doubt on her credibility, including through her alleged abuser’s own legal counsel writing in the pages of Al Jazeera while the investigation remained open and ongoing.
Karim Khan, by contrast, is an elected official. He is not bound by the same confidentiality constraints. He can give hour-long televised interviews. His team can place favorable information with sympathetic outlets. His lawyers can publish op-eds in major international media. His counsel can speak to specialized legal publications. His side of this story has been told, retold, and amplified across multiple platforms in multiple languages. Hers has not been told at all because, if she spoke, she would face termination.
This is the power imbalance made visible. And it is worth noting that it is the same power imbalance that sits at the heart of the original allegations: a vulnerable P2 staff member, working in the most politically exposed prosecutorial office in international criminal justice, directly supervised by one of the most powerful elected officials in the international legal system.
Those of us who have spent years inside the UN system are not surprised by any of this. We have watched this film before. We know how it ends, or rather, how it is made to end.
Take the case of Martina Brostrom and Luiz Loures, then-Deputy Executive Director of UNAIDS and Assistant Secretary-General of the United Nations. Brostrom alleged that Loures sexually harassed her from 2011 onward and sexually assaulted her in a hotel lift in Bangkok in 2015 during a major UNAIDS conference. An internal investigation cleared him. Brostrom went public in 2018. Only then did Loures announce he would not seek renewal of his position, stepping down at the end of March 2018, with UNAIDS spokesman Mahesh Mahalingam carefully telling reporters that the decision had “no connection to the allegations.”
But Brostrom would not stay silent. She was brave enough to face the institution and name what had happened to her. And the institution went after her for it. The UN fabricated a case of financial and sexual misconduct against her, involving the man who would become her husband and the father of her children. She was fired in December 2019.
“This is what the UN does to women who report their sexual offenders,” she told CNN. “They just want to get me out of the organisation.”
The independent expert panel appointed to review the UNAIDS scandal found overwhelming evidence of a broken organisational culture and called for the replacement of top leadership. UNAIDS chief Michel Sidibé, faulted for attempting to quietly suppress the matter while an official probe was underway, eventually resigned. The second OIOS investigation into Loures concluded, and its findings were never shared with the victims or the public. To this day.
The parallel to the Khan case is precise. In both cases, an initial internal investigation cleared the senior official. The complainant faced institutional retaliation. The organization prioritized its own reputation over accountability. And the senior official seems able to walk away with his narrative largely intact, while the woman who spoke up had her career and credibility systematically dismantled.
Consider also what happened at UNRWA with the former Commissioner-General in 2019. The minute the misconduct report against him was leaked to the public, the reaction was instant and predictable: this was the Israeli lobby trying to bring down a man who had defended the Palestinian cause too vocally, too visibly, too effectively. And yes, the former Commissioner-General was a genuine defender of that cause. He was a good soldier for UNRWA’s mandate, and nobody should pretend otherwise. And yes, the Israeli lobby machine jumped on that report the moment it was leaked, with everything it had, determined to use it to finish him. That part is also true.
So is this: the misconduct was real.
It existed, it was documented, and it predated the Israeli campaign against him by a considerable period. The geopolitical attack came later. The misconduct came first. Those are two separate facts and the deliberate conflation of them, whether by design or by lazy analysis, served one purpose: to make the misconduct disappear inside the politics.
I know this not as an outside observer. I know it because I went through the UN machinery myself. Not for sexual harassment, but for doing what every staff member is told they are protected to do: speaking up against misconduct and abuse of authority, and then watching the full force of institutional retaliation come down in response. I challenged that machinery in a case of abuse of authority and retaliation at both the UN Dispute Tribunal and the UN Appeals Tribunal. I won both times. I know precisely how it operates because I made it answer for itself.
But I will say this plainly: I could do that because I knew the system from the inside, having spent twenty years within it. For ninety percent of staff who find themselves in the same position, the institution will destroy them long before they reach a favourable judgment. The process is the punishment. That is by design.
I know what that machinery looks like from the inside. I know its patience, its sophistication, its absolute determination to protect the institution and the powerful individuals within it at any cost. The USGs and ASGs who operate within it are not clumsy. They are not obvious. They are charming, credentialed, politically connected and ruthless. And they know exactly which levers to pull and when.
Brostrom was a skilled, dedicated, highly capable UN professional. She is also a woman. And the institution looked at those two facts and decided which one was more useful to weaponise against her. The same calculus is being applied to the complainant in the Khan case right now, in real time, by people who have persuaded themselves, or wish to persuade us, that they are defenders of justice.
Karim Khan is still on voluntary leave as of this writing. The Bureau of the Assembly of States Parties has not formally closed the case. A group of states has moved to have the bureau conduct its own assessment of the OIOS findings, effectively sidelining the judges’ panel, a move Khan himself has described as a “dangerous subversion of due process”.
Both MEE and Al Jazeera have done genuinely important work on Gaza, on the Palestine investigation, and on the immense institutional pressures bearing down on the ICC. That work matters and should not be dismissed. But what MEE and Al Jazeera and every external observer who reflexively reaches for the geopolitical explanation will never fully grasp is this: both things can be true simultaneously.
The Israeli lobby can exploit a misconduct case for its own ends and the misconduct can still be real. The two are not mutually exclusive. They never were.
MEE and Al Jazeera chose to treat this case as already settled. They chose to amplify the prosecutor’s narrative while the complainant was silenced. They chose to publish his lawyer’s defence brief as editorial opinion. That is a failure worth naming simply because justice for Palestinians and accountability for powerful men who abuse junior staff members are not mutually exclusive propositions. Choosing the geopolitical story over the accountability story is not analysis. It is a choice. And it has consequences for every person inside these organizations who is weighing, right now, whether speaking up is worth it. Any outlet that cannot hold both of those things at the same time is not covering the story. It is choosing a side.
The women inside these institutions who endure this, who weigh their careers, their contracts, their visas, their families against the decision to speak, deserve better than to be reduced to collateral damage in someone else’s political story by the outlets they read.
We know who they are. We have worked beside them. And we are not done talking about this.
This is a terrific piece that does a wonderful job of explaining the power dynamics, as well as the legal framework operating in this case.