An internal file has concluded that Karim Khan, the International Criminal Court's chief prosecutor, engaged in sexual harassment when he engaged in sexual activity with a female member of his office staff, according to The New York Times. The confidential report will now go before ICC member states for consideration, the paper reported July 8, 2026.

The finding lands roughly a month after the court's Bureau — the body composed of the President of the Assembly of States Parties and its vice-presidents, distinct from the full Assembly of States Parties — suspended Khan pending a wider vote on the misconduct allegations. That suspension was announced in a June 8, 2026 ICC press release titled "Decision of the Bureau concerning the outcome of disciplinary proceedings involving the Prosecutor of the International Criminal Court," and confirmed the same day by Reuters and the New York Times.

The underlying allegations are not new. They first surfaced internally at the ICC in May 2024, and Khan took leave from the court that same month amid the emerging accusations, as Justice Info reported at the time — reporting that identified the complainant as a female employee within his own office. The June 8 Times account noted the accusation had been kept confidential throughout the disciplinary process, a posture consistent with ICC staff regulations governing internal misconduct proceedings but one that left the underlying facts largely opaque to outside observers for more than a year. Khan has repeatedly denied the accusations, per the same reporting.

What has changed with the July 8 disclosure is that an internal file — the product of that confidential disciplinary process — has now made an affirmative finding against him, rather than merely registering an unresolved complaint. The distinction matters procedurally. A pending allegation triggers precautionary suspension; a substantiated finding triggers a different set of consequences, up to and including removal proceedings under Article 46 of the Rome Statute, which governs the removal of ICC officials, including the Prosecutor, for serious misconduct. The Bureau's June decision was explicitly framed as an interim measure "pending a wider vote," language that signaled the Assembly of States Parties, not the Bureau alone, would ultimately have to act on any final finding.

The mechanics of ICC accountability are worth setting out plainly for anyone tracking this case, because they explain why the process has stretched across two years. The Prosecutor is elected by the Assembly of States Parties and, unlike judges, sits largely outside the day-to-day disciplinary apparatus that governs ICC staff. Complaints against the Prosecutor route instead through the Independent Oversight Mechanism and ultimately to the Bureau and Assembly, a structure designed to insulate prosecutorial independence from political interference but one that also means removal requires a supermajority vote among states parties rather than an internal HR determination. That structure has drawn criticism in the past for moving slowly relative to complaints against ordinary staff, and this case — running from a May 2024 internal complaint to a June 2026 suspension to a July 2026 finding — illustrates that tempo.

The timing carries its own weight. Khan has been the ICC's most publicly visible prosecutor in years, having sought arrest warrants tied to the Gaza war and pursued cases connected to Russia's invasion of Ukraine, work that made him a lightning rod for state pressure from multiple directions well before the harassment allegations became public. A finding of misconduct against a sitting prosecutor with that profile inevitably raises questions about continuity of active investigations and warrant applications should removal proceedings advance, quite apart from the merits of the harassment finding itself.

It is also worth separating what is established from what remains open. The NYT reporting establishes that an internal file has made a finding; it does not establish what sanction, if any, the Assembly of States Parties will impose, nor whether Khan intends to contest the finding through whatever internal appeal mechanism the ICC's own regulations provide. States parties will now weigh a report whose contents remain confidential in full, working from characterizations rather than the underlying document — a dynamic familiar to anyone who has watched international bodies adjudicate misconduct by their own most senior officials, where confidentiality rules meant to protect complainants also constrain public scrutiny of the process itself.

The next procedural marker will be whatever vote or resolution the Assembly of States Parties schedules to act on the Bureau's referral. Until then, Khan's formal status appears to remain suspended rather than removed, with the disciplinary file now sitting in member states' hands rather than the court's internal machinery.