Professor Anne Bayefsky, the Director of the Touro Institute on Human Rights and the Holocaust and President of the Human Rights Voices organization, spoke with Arutz Sheva - Israel National News about the Wall Street Journal report that International Criminal Court Chief Prosecutor Karim Khan announced that he sought arrest warrants against Israeli leaders less than three weeks after he was accused of sexual assault.
"Assuming the Me-Too movement includes rapists of Muslim women, the sordid reports of Khan's behavior is a full-circle moment for the International Criminal Court," Professor Bayefsky began.
"The Rome Statute that created the ICC was drafted to skewer Israelis and is being employed to backstop Palestinian terrorists who use rape as a weapon of war," she said. "The well-worn phrase 'the hate and violence that starts with Jews never ends with Jews' comes to mind."
"Perhaps the sickest dimension - aside from the fact that Khan has not been removed from office and the Court's judges are maintaining Khan's Israeli arrest warrants - is that the victim here apparently weighed the benefits of taking action against her perpetrator versus the benefits of that same perpetrator's taking action against Israelis. Khan is reportedly hoping to save himself by projecting that same perverse antisemitic thought process on the international law world. And so far, he's succeeding," she said.
According to the Wall Street Journal report, Khan responded to the international pressure to criminalize Israel's response to the October 7 massacre by taking out his frustrations on his staff. When one of Khan's assistants asked him to ease up in his treatment of her, he summoned her to his suite at the Millennium Hilton hotel near the UN's New York headquarters.
The staffer, a Malaysian woman in her 30s, testified that Khan sexually assaulted her and prevented her from leaving, an act she said was part of a pattern of similar actions.
The alleged victim said that she did not come forward at first because she was afraid of losing her job and of not being able to pay the medical bills for her mother, who was suffering from cancer. In addition, she feared retaliation from Khan and did not want to jeopardize the ICC's warrants against Israeli leaders.
Two and a half weeks after he learned of the accusations against him, Khan canceled a fact-finding mission to Israel and announced that he was seeking arrest warrants against Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and then-Defense Minister Yoav Gallant in May 2024. In an unusual move, the ICC prosecutor announced the warrants during an interview with CNN rather than in an official setting, despite receiving advice from fellow prosecutors not to make the announcement in such a manner.
The timing and unusual manner of the announcement of the warrants against the Israeli leaders has caused concern that the warrants were connected to the accusations against Khan, whose shift against Israel has shorn up his support among the parties that criticized him in the early days of the war between Hamas and Israel.
While Khan has denied both the accusations of sexual assault and any connection between the accusations and the warrants, the report found that he used the investigation against Israel in an attempt to silence his accuser, who had supported the ICC's investigation of the Jewish State. He is alleged to have told her, “Think about the Palestinian arrest warrants.”
