Among supporters of justice for the victims of international crimes, it may be an unpopular opinion to second-guess the hero of the moment, International Criminal Court Prosecutor Karim Khan.
This week, Mr Khan announced his bombshell application to seek warrants for the arrest of Israel’s Prime Minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, and Defence Minister Yoav Gallant for enacting policies of mass starvation against civilians in Gaza, among other alleged atrocities. He also seeks the arrest of three leaders of the Palestinian militant group Hamas.
But there is reason to believe the Israeli charges will result in no legal justice for Palestinian victims at all, perhaps even by design.
On the face of things, Mr Khan’s prosecution is as noble as he is tough. The video of his read-out of the charges – “murder”, “extermination”, “starvation”, as he stares resolutely into the camera – will haunt Mr Netanyahu’s and Mr Gallant’s legacies forever.
A closer reading of Mr Khan’s time in the Office of the Prosecutor (OTP), however, suggests his prosecutions are motivated more by political aims than the prospect of a conviction. That is the common theme that resolves what might otherwise appear to be glaring inconsistencies in his words and actions since he took office, in June 2021.
Mr Khan’s prosecutorial career at the ICC was launched on the implicit basis that he was unlikely ever to display the kind of boldness the world saw in his Palestine-Israel announcement video. He was, his detractors at the time said, the West’s candidate for the job, and the evidence for that came quickly in the way he handled the Court’s Afghanistan investigation.
The year before Mr Khan’s appointment, his predecessor Fatou Bensouda opened an investigation into Afghanistan that covered international crimes committed by all parties to the conflict there since 2003, when Afghanistan signed the ICC’s founding document, the Rome Statute. “All parties” includes personnel from the US, Nato, the Afghan republic government, the Taliban and the terrorist group ISIS-K.
It was – and remains – the only time the ICC has probed crimes committed by US forces, which allegedly included extrajudicial killings and torture. Ms Bensouda came under immense pressure; she and even her family were sanctioned by the US government. Mr Khan’s recent decision to prosecute Israeli leaders has brought him threats of similar American sanctions.
When Ms Bensouda’s term was coming to an end and it was time for the court’s member states – which includes many Nato countries and other US allies – to elect a new prosecutor, Mr Khan was not initially on the shortlist. He emerged after rumours of considerable lobbying from western governments who were looking for someone who could be more “pragmatic” and “realistic” in the way they approached the job.
In April 2021, two months after Mr Khan was chosen, the American Society of International Law published a report authored by former top US State Department lawyers on how Washington could improve its relationship with the Court. It could also be read – and indeed was, by many – as full of hints on how the Court could improve its relationship with Washington.
The report notes the following about Karim Khan: “The new prosecutor may be more willing to revisit past decisions with a fresh eye if provided with persuasive arguments or compelling evidence of the wisdom of reconsidering ... prior approaches.”
One of the “persuasive arguments” the report cites is that of former US legal adviser John Bellinger, who said: “There is no possibility that any US official will ever be arrested and prosecuted in The Hague … The likelihood of prosecutions is zero.”
In other words, was it really worthy of the time of a new prosecutor trying to prove himself to charge Americans whom he had virtually no prospect of apprehending? After all, the Rome Statute does not allow conviction in absentia.
Election-year Karim Khan seemed to agree with that assessment. He soon “deprioritised” the US and its allies in the Afghanistan investigation he inherited from Ms Bensouda, and focused entirely instead on prosecuting the Taliban and ISIS-K.
It is hard to overstate the psychological impact this decision has had on Afghan victims. As Shaharzad Akbar, former chair of the Afghan Independent Human Rights Commission, put it: “This decision reinforces the perception that these institutions set up in the West and by the West are just instruments for the West’s political agenda.”
In my conversations with Afghan civilians and members of the Taliban, they have echoed that sentiment strongly. The Taliban, who now rule Afghanistan, reject the ICC’s mandate on what they claim are religious grounds. But the Court’s perceived partiality has diminished the chances that they, as the de-facto inheritor of Afghanistan’s signature on the Rome Statute, might ever co-operate with international tribunals.
Khan’s time in office suggests his prosecutions are motivated more by political aims than the prospect of a conviction
Mr Khan did not frame his decision at the time as a pragmatic one – that would have been surprising, and disrespectful to the victims of western and Afghan republic forces’ crimes. Instead, his stated rationale was that “the worst crimes” were committed by the Taliban and ISIS-K.
But contrast that with his statements this week when he was accused of drawing an equivalence between Israel and Hamas. Mr Khan told CNN that the Prosecutor’s mandate is not concerned with which perpetrator is worse – only with the equal rights of all victims to see justice.
The absence of that principled stand on behalf of Afghan victims could lead one to reasonably conclude that Mr Khan is indeed every bit the pragmatist Washington pegged him for, but what the US didn’t count on was that his pragmatism cuts both ways and in line with his – not victims’ – interests. Election-year Karim Khan could afford to deprioritise crimes that – compared to what is happening in Gaza today – few around the world seemed to care about. But in 2024 Karim Khan has a chance to make history by being the first Prosecutor to take on the leader of a “western-style democracy”.
Nonetheless, boldness does not in itself secure a conviction. It is more likely to do the opposite. If Mr Khan wants to see an Israeli who is found guilty of committing war crimes in handcuffs, he might have better luck prosecuting an active-duty military officer first. When he joined the OTP, long before the Gaza war began, a full dossier from the Court’s pre-existing Palestine investigation was sitting on his desk, which he could have used to get warrants for lower-level perpetrators, and those would have had a much higher chance of being enforced.
They still do; Mr Netanyahu’s chances of ever appearing in the dock over Gaza are about as high as George W Bush’s over Afghanistan. And observers of international criminal trials will note that in the most successful ones – the tribunal for the former Yugoslavia being a good example – prosecutors start lower down the conviction ladder and work their way up.
Weekend Essays from The National
There is a long-standing trope in legal dramas of the prosecutor who wants to make a name for themselves by going after the most prominent person they can, rather than lower-level suspects more easily tied to the crime. Ironically, when Mr Khan was a defence lawyer arguing cases before the ICC nearly a decade ago, he heavily implied the Prosecutor at the time, Luis Moreno Ocampo, was one such character.
Today, it is Mr Khan whose track record shows a string of probably unenforceable warrants that are extremely unlikely to lead to trial (Russian President Vladimir Putin being another example). This indicates, as someone who used to work in the OTP put it to me, that “Mr Khan is a symbolic prosecutor rather than a realistic one – exactly the opposite of what he campaigned for [to get the job]”.
To be fair to Mr Khan, there is an argument to be made that he is working in the service of a broader conception of international justice, one that prioritises symbolism, and says that convictions are not as important as using the Court's moral weight to change the political winds against those who commit crimes. But that interpretation is cynical in its own way. The court is not merely a creative tool for political advocacy.
To suggest that convictions should be subordinate to political aims is to suggest that the Court's entire proceedings are largely meant to be theatre. Arrest warrants have huge symbolic value, and they have their own hard political value, too. But at the end of the day, they are an instrument for something more concrete: an actual arrest. If ICC suspects are never arrested, then the court's credibility diminishes, and there isn't much moral weight to throw around anyway.
So Mr Khan can be credited with making history for the Palestinian cause. He will be perceived by many as having shown more courage to take on the Netanyahu government than most hand-wringing politicians ever have. But for the very real victims of war crimes – from Afghanistan to Ukraine to Palestine – the prosecutor’s courage only counts insofar as it gets a conviction.
Specs%20
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Profile
Company: Justmop.com
Date started: December 2015
Founders: Kerem Kuyucu and Cagatay Ozcan
Sector: Technology and home services
Based: Jumeirah Lake Towers, Dubai
Size: 55 employees and 100,000 cleaning requests a month
Funding: The company’s investors include Collective Spark, Faith Capital Holding, Oak Capital, VentureFriends, and 500 Startups.
UAE currency: the story behind the money in your pockets
2025 Fifa Club World Cup groups
Group A: Palmeiras, Porto, Al Ahly, Inter Miami.
Group B: Paris Saint-Germain, Atletico Madrid, Botafogo, Seattle.
Group C: Bayern Munich, Auckland City, Boca Juniors, Benfica.
Group D: Flamengo, ES Tunis, Chelsea, (Leon banned).
Group E: River Plate, Urawa, Monterrey, Inter Milan.
Group F: Fluminense, Borussia Dortmund, Ulsan, Mamelodi Sundowns.
Group G: Manchester City, Wydad, Al Ain, Juventus.
Group H: Real Madrid, Al Hilal, Pachuca, Salzburg.
Who is Tim-Berners Lee?
Sir Tim Berners-Lee was born in London in a household of mathematicians and computer scientists. Both his mother, Mary Lee, and father, Conway, were early computer scientists who worked on the Ferranti 1 - the world's first commercially-available, general purpose digital computer. Sir Tim studied Physics at the University of Oxford and held a series of roles developing code and building software before moving to Switzerland to work for Cern, the European Particle Physics laboratory. He developed the worldwide web code as a side project in 1989 as a global information-sharing system. After releasing the first web code in 1991, Cern made it open and free for all to use. Sir Tim now campaigns for initiatives to make sure the web remains open and accessible to all.
SANCTIONED
- Kirill Shamalov, Russia's youngest billionaire and previously married to Putin's daughter Katarina
- Petr Fradkov, head of recently sanctioned Promsvyazbank and son of former head of Russian Foreign Intelligence, the FSB.
- Denis Bortnikov, Deputy President of Russia's largest bank VTB. He is the son of Alexander Bortnikov, head of the FSB which was responsible for the poisoning of political activist Alexey Navalny in August 2020 with banned chemical agent novichok.
- Yury Slyusar, director of United Aircraft Corporation, a major aircraft manufacturer for the Russian military.
- Elena Aleksandrovna Georgieva, chair of the board of Novikombank, a state-owned defence conglomerate.
List of alleged parties
May 15 2020: PM and Carrie attend 'work meeting' with at
least 17 staff members
May 20 2020: PM and Carrie attend 'bring your own booze'
party
Nov 27 2020: PM gives speech at leaving do for his staff
Dec 10 2020: Staff party held by then-education secretary
Gavin Williamson
Dec 13 2020: PM and Carrie throw a flat party
Dec 14 2020: London mayor candidate Shaun Bailey holds staff party at Conservative
Party headquarters
Dec 15 2020: PM takes part in a staff quiz
Dec 18 2020: Downing Street Christmas party
if you go
The flights
Air Astana flies direct from Dubai to Almaty from Dh2,440 per person return, and to Astana (via Almaty) from Dh2,930 return, both including taxes.
The hotels
Rooms at the Ritz-Carlton Almaty cost from Dh1,944 per night including taxes; and in Astana the new Ritz-Carlton Astana (www.marriott) costs from Dh1,325; alternatively, the new St Regis Astana costs from Dh1,458 per night including taxes.
When to visit
March-May and September-November
Visas
Citizens of many countries, including the UAE do not need a visa to enter Kazakhstan for up to 30 days. Contact the nearest Kazakhstan embassy or consulate.
More on Quran memorisation:
Killing of Qassem Suleimani
How to register as a donor
1) Organ donors can register on the Hayat app, run by the Ministry of Health and Prevention
2) There are about 11,000 patients in the country in need of organ transplants
3) People must be over 21. Emiratis and residents can register.
4) The campaign uses the hashtag #donate_hope
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The smuggler
Eldarir had arrived at JFK in January 2020 with three suitcases, containing goods he valued at $300, when he was directed to a search area.
Officers found 41 gold artefacts among the bags, including amulets from a funerary set which prepared the deceased for the afterlife.
Also found was a cartouche of a Ptolemaic king on a relief that was originally part of a royal building or temple.
The largest single group of items found in Eldarir’s cases were 400 shabtis, or figurines.
Khouli conviction
Khouli smuggled items into the US by making false declarations to customs about the country of origin and value of the items.
According to Immigration and Customs Enforcement, he provided “false provenances which stated that [two] Egyptian antiquities were part of a collection assembled by Khouli's father in Israel in the 1960s” when in fact “Khouli acquired the Egyptian antiquities from other dealers”.
He was sentenced to one year of probation, six months of home confinement and 200 hours of community service in 2012 after admitting buying and smuggling Egyptian antiquities, including coffins, funerary boats and limestone figures.
For sale
A number of other items said to come from the collection of Ezeldeen Taha Eldarir are currently or recently for sale.
Their provenance is described in near identical terms as the British Museum shabti: bought from Salahaddin Sirmali, "authenticated and appraised" by Hossen Rashed, then imported to the US in 1948.
- An Egyptian Mummy mask dating from 700BC-30BC, is on offer for £11,807 ($15,275) online by a seller in Mexico
- A coffin lid dating back to 664BC-332BC was offered for sale by a Colorado-based art dealer, with a starting price of $65,000
- A shabti that was on sale through a Chicago-based coin dealer, dating from 1567BC-1085BC, is up for $1,950
Tips to stay safe during hot weather
- Stay hydrated: Drink plenty of fluids, especially water. Avoid alcohol and caffeine, which can increase dehydration.
- Seek cool environments: Use air conditioning, fans, or visit community spaces with climate control.
- Limit outdoor activities: Avoid strenuous activity during peak heat. If outside, seek shade and wear a wide-brimmed hat.
- Dress appropriately: Wear lightweight, loose and light-coloured clothing to facilitate heat loss.
- Check on vulnerable people: Regularly check in on elderly neighbours, young children and those with health conditions.
- Home adaptations: Use blinds or curtains to block sunlight, avoid using ovens or stoves, and ventilate living spaces during cooler hours.
- Recognise heat illness: Learn the signs of heat exhaustion and heat stroke (dizziness, confusion, rapid pulse, nausea), and seek medical attention if symptoms occur.
More from Rashmee Roshan Lall
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Company%20profile
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Sole survivors
- Cecelia Crocker was on board Northwest Airlines Flight 255 in 1987 when it crashed in Detroit, killing 154 people, including her parents and brother. The plane had hit a light pole on take off
- George Lamson Jr, from Minnesota, was on a Galaxy Airlines flight that crashed in Reno in 1985, killing 68 people. His entire seat was launched out of the plane
- Bahia Bakari, then 12, survived when a Yemenia Airways flight crashed near the Comoros in 2009, killing 152. She was found clinging to wreckage after floating in the ocean for 13 hours.
- Jim Polehinke was the co-pilot and sole survivor of a 2006 Comair flight that crashed in Lexington, Kentucky, killing 49.
Benefits of first-time home buyers' scheme
- Priority access to new homes from participating developers
- Discounts on sales price of off-plan units
- Flexible payment plans from developers
- Mortgages with better interest rates, faster approval times and reduced fees
- DLD registration fee can be paid through banks or credit cards at zero interest rates
The candidates
Dr Ayham Ammora, scientist and business executive
Ali Azeem, business leader
Tony Booth, professor of education
Lord Browne, former BP chief executive
Dr Mohamed El-Erian, economist
Professor Wyn Evans, astrophysicist
Dr Mark Mann, scientist
Gina MIller, anti-Brexit campaigner
Lord Smith, former Cabinet minister
Sandi Toksvig, broadcaster
The National's picks
4.35pm: Tilal Al Khalediah
5.10pm: Continous
5.45pm: Raging Torrent
6.20pm: West Acre
7pm: Flood Zone
7.40pm: Straight No Chaser
8.15pm: Romantic Warrior
8.50pm: Calandogan
9.30pm: Forever Young
More from Neighbourhood Watch:
COMPANY%20PROFILE%20
%3Cp%3EName%3A%20DarDoc%3Cbr%3EBased%3A%20Abu%20Dhabi%3Cbr%3EFounders%3A%20Samer%20Masri%2C%20Keswin%20Suresh%3Cbr%3ESector%3A%20HealthTech%3Cbr%3ETotal%20funding%3A%20%24800%2C000%3Cbr%3EInvestors%3A%20Flat6Labs%2C%20angel%20investors%20%2B%20Incubated%20by%20Hub71%2C%20Abu%20Dhabi's%20Department%20of%20Health%3Cbr%3ENumber%20of%20employees%3A%2010%3C%2Fp%3E%0A
Where to donate in the UAE
The Emirates Charity Portal
You can donate to several registered charities through a “donation catalogue”. The use of the donation is quite specific, such as buying a fan for a poor family in Niger for Dh130.
The General Authority of Islamic Affairs & Endowments
The site has an e-donation service accepting debit card, credit card or e-Dirham, an electronic payment tool developed by the Ministry of Finance and First Abu Dhabi Bank.
Al Noor Special Needs Centre
You can donate online or order Smiles n’ Stuff products handcrafted by Al Noor students. The centre publishes a wish list of extras needed, starting at Dh500.
Beit Al Khair Society
Beit Al Khair Society has the motto “From – and to – the UAE,” with donations going towards the neediest in the country. Its website has a list of physical donation sites, but people can also contribute money by SMS, bank transfer and through the hotline 800-22554.
Dar Al Ber Society
Dar Al Ber Society, which has charity projects in 39 countries, accept cash payments, money transfers or SMS donations. Its donation hotline is 800-79.
Dubai Cares
Dubai Cares provides several options for individuals and companies to donate, including online, through banks, at retail outlets, via phone and by purchasing Dubai Cares branded merchandise. It is currently running a campaign called Bookings 2030, which allows people to help change the future of six underprivileged children and young people.
Emirates Airline Foundation
Those who travel on Emirates have undoubtedly seen the little donation envelopes in the seat pockets. But the foundation also accepts donations online and in the form of Skywards Miles. Donated miles are used to sponsor travel for doctors, surgeons, engineers and other professionals volunteering on humanitarian missions around the world.
Emirates Red Crescent
On the Emirates Red Crescent website you can choose between 35 different purposes for your donation, such as providing food for fasters, supporting debtors and contributing to a refugee women fund. It also has a list of bank accounts for each donation type.
Gulf for Good
Gulf for Good raises funds for partner charity projects through challenges, like climbing Kilimanjaro and cycling through Thailand. This year’s projects are in partnership with Street Child Nepal, Larchfield Kids, the Foundation for African Empowerment and SOS Children's Villages. Since 2001, the organisation has raised more than $3.5 million (Dh12.8m) in support of over 50 children’s charities.
Noor Dubai Foundation
Sheikh Mohammed bin Rashid Al Maktoum launched the Noor Dubai Foundation a decade ago with the aim of eliminating all forms of preventable blindness globally. You can donate Dh50 to support mobile eye camps by texting the word “Noor” to 4565 (Etisalat) or 4849 (du).
COMPANY PROFILE
Name: Kumulus Water
Started: 2021
Founders: Iheb Triki and Mohamed Ali Abid
Based: Tunisia
Sector: Water technology
Number of staff: 22
Investment raised: $4 million
