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PORTRAIT – Since his election to the Worldwide Felony Court docket, this British lawyer has demonstrated his need to problem highly effective nations. He has simply requested an arrest warrant in opposition to Benyamin Netanyahu and Hamas officers.
Earlier than Monday Could 20, Karim Khan was not unknown. However by requesting arrest warrants in opposition to a number of Hamas leaders and in opposition to Israeli leaders, together with Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, the prosecutor of the Worldwide Felony Court docket has attracted new gentle. This resolution earned him the assist of a number of international locations, together with France, but in addition criticism from the US and Italy, who judged “unacceptable” to place Hamas and the Jewish state on the identical stage. The pinnacle of the Israeli authorities, for his half, “rejected the Hague prosecutor’s comparability with disgust».
This request represents a powerful gesture on the a part of Karim Khan. “Nobody is above the regulation”he argued to our colleagues at CNN. Elected president of the excessive courtroom in February 2021, Karim Khan has since demonstrated his need to battle with out discrimination in opposition to the highly effective. In March 2023, he additionally issued an arrest warrant in opposition to Vladimir Putin, accusing him of battle crimes for “unlawful deportation» of hundreds of Ukrainian youngsters within the context of the battle between Moscow and kyiv. In return, the Russian Inside Ministry positioned him on its needed listing.
Protection of African dictators
A former pupil of the distinguished King’s School London, this native of Edinburgh, Scotland, reduce his tooth as a particular advisor within the prosecutor’s workplace of the 2 worldwide felony tribunals for the previous Yugoslavia and Rwanda, between 1997 and 2000 He owes this attraction to worldwide regulation to his membership within the Ahmadiyya Muslim neighborhood, a persecuted reformist motion in Islam. This motion settled in the UK within the Nineteen Eighties, after being expelled from Pakistan for a regulation prohibiting its followers from calling themselves Muslims and limiting their spiritual practices.
Throughout his profession as a lawyer, Karim Khan didn’t all the time take the aspect of the victims. Within the 2000s, he notably defended the previous Liberian dictator Charles Taylor, accused by a particular UN tribunal of homicide, rape and the usage of little one troopers. With out success, for the reason that autocrat was discovered responsible and sentenced to 50 years in jail.
Throughout the 2010s, Karim Khan was additionally the lawyer of Saif al-Islam, the second son of Libyan dictator Muammar Gaddafi. Sentenced to dying in absentia in 2015, for battle crimes and crimes in opposition to humanity, he was lastly launched in 2016 and ran within the 2021 Libyan presidential election, supported by the Wagner militia. He won’t be elected. One other dictator defended by Karim Khan: William Ruto, right now president of Kenya. He’s accused of crimes in opposition to humanity, following post-election violence in 2007, which left 1,200 useless. Khan managed to have him acquitted, however not earlier than dealing with allegations of witness intimidation, after one in all them was discovered useless in 2014.
Investigation into the Taliban and ISIS
William Ruto’s protection then vastly benefited the British lawyer. Earlier than being elected president of the ICC in February 2021, he was not on the listing of candidates. His identify was added on the insistent request of the Kenyan authorities, in accordance with The Guardian . Khan was elected there by acquiring 72 votes out of the 62 required, forward of Irish, Spanish and Italian candidates, with notable assist from the African continent. He then turns into the third prosecutor of the ICC since its implementation in 2002, for a mandate of 9 years.
His first feat of arms was to renew, in September 2021, the investigation regarding crimes dedicated by the Taliban and the Islamic State in Khorasan in Afghanistan, which had been suspended in spring 2020, on the request of the federal government of Kabul, which was then striving to show that its judicial system was able to prosecuting the perpetrators of the acts. Karim Khan, alternatively, determined to“discard priorities” investigations into crimes dedicated by worldwide forces, significantly American forces, in Afghanistan. But in addition to droop the investigation into torture within the secret prisons of the CIA, put in within the early 2000s in Poland, Romania and Lithuania, the place dozens of people suspected of belonging to the Taliban or al -Qaeda.
