The accused

The British barrister, the Netanyahu arrest warrant and the sexual assault case that could destroy the ICC. Chloe Hadjimatheou reports

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In the middle of October last year Karim Khan KC, the chief prosecutor at the International Criminal Court (ICC), took a call from one of the lawyers in his office. But the hour-long conversation wasn't about the most challenging case they were working on, against the Israeli prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu. It was about allegations that had been made against Khan himself.

The man tasked since 2021 with trying the most serious human rights abuses in the world had been accused of molesting a woman in his office. And the person on the other end of that phone call was his alleged victim. "Be wise... We're in shark-infested waters," the prosecutor told her in a recording that has been leaked to The Observer.

Months earlier, in floods of tears, the woman had confided to colleagues that for almost a year, Khan, 55, had been allegedly molesting her in his office and engaging in non-consensual sex with her in hotel rooms during work trips abroad. A friend of hers says that she recounted how she "would just lie there. One time [she] even pretended to be asleep". Afterwards she would vomit, she told people.

Friends say she was afraid of Khan, who she said would freeze her out if she tried to resist his advances. The position she held in his department was her dream job and she was sure that if she tried to report the alleged abuse, her career would be over.

The colleagues in whom she confided felt the matter was so serious that they had to relay her allegations to the Independent Oversight Mechanism (IOM), the official body that investigates claims of wrongdoing at the ICC.

Within days, however, the IOM closed the case without any further action, recommending minimal contact between the woman and Khan, while leaving her to continue working in the same office. But journalists had started asking questions. It looked like someone at the ICC was leaking details of the allegations to the media.