By: Tzirel Rosenblatt – Jewish Voice News

A growing scandal surrounding the embattled International Criminal Court (ICC) chief prosecutor Karim Khan has taken a darker turn following revelations that the Qatari government allegedly financed a covert campaign to discredit one of his sexual harassment accusers. According to explosive findings published by The Guardian of the UK and reviewed in detail by Israel National News, the Qatari regime reportedly hired a private London-based intelligence firm to conduct surveillance, gather personal information, and construct defamatory narratives targeting the woman who accused Khan of coercive sexual behavior.

The firm—identified as Highgate—and a smaller subcontractor allegedly compiled extensive data on the woman and her family, including her child, in what appears to be an effort to silence or intimidate her. Israel National News reports that internal documents reviewed by investigators revealed that Highgate executives referred to their client only as a “Q country,” carefully avoiding the explicit mention of Qatar by name, even in internal correspondence.

What makes this revelation particularly striking, the report at Israel National News observed, is the allegation that Highgate’s operatives sought to fabricate supposed connections between the accuser and the State of Israel—a strategy that suggests a cynical attempt to weaponize political tensions to deflect attention from Khan and his mounting misconduct allegations.

The woman at the center of the case, herself a lawyer employed at the ICC, told The Guardian that the revelations were “deeply disturbing.” Her statement, quoted by Israel National News, reflected both disbelief and fear: “The idea that private intelligence firms have been instructed to target me is as incomprehensible as it is heartbreaking.”

The accuser’s complaint, initially filed in 2023, accused Khan of coercive sexual advances and misconduct during his tenure as the Court’s top prosecutor. Her allegations prompted an internal ICC ethics inquiry, which later expanded following a second woman’s report of similar behavior. The second accuser, who interned under Khan in The Hague in 2009, told investigators that he persistently harassed her—pressuring her to work at his home, where he allegedly initiated unwanted physical contact and attempted to persuade her to engage in further sexual acts.

As Israel National News reported, these testimonies have triggered the most serious internal crisis in the ICC’s two-decade history, casting doubt on the integrity of an institution already struggling to maintain credibility amid accusations of selective justice and political bias.

The timeline of events has only deepened suspicions surrounding Khan’s motives and the ICC’s impartiality. Within three weeks of the first woman’s complaint becoming public, Khan announced that his office was seeking arrest warrants against Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and then-Defense Minister Yoav Gallant, alleging war crimes in Gaza.

As Israel National News has repeatedly noted, the proximity between the sexual harassment allegations and the decision to target Israeli leaders has fueled claims that the prosecutor’s actions were politically motivated—or worse, an attempt at personal diversion.

The Wall Street Journal reported that Khan’s pursuit of Israeli officials was part of an urgent push to reassert authority amid the sexual misconduct scandal threatening to engulf him. His critics argue that he weaponized the ICC’s authority to deflect attention from his own moral and legal exposure.

Among the sharpest critics of Khan’s actions is Professor Anne Bayefsky, Director of the Touro Institute on Human Rights and the Holocaust and President of Human Rights Voices, who spoke to Arutz Sheva – Israel National News. Bayefsky stated bluntly that Khan appeared to be “hoping to save himself by projecting that same perverse antisemitic thought process on the international law world.”

She added that the ICC’s selective outrage—aggressively pursuing Israel while ignoring far more egregious human rights violations elsewhere—reflects “a deep moral corruption at the heart of the institution,” one that mirrors the “political manipulation and moral cowardice that has long tainted the international legal system.”

As the Israel National News report emphasized, the role of Qatar in this unfolding scandal cannot be overstated. The Gulf emirate has long positioned itself as a key intermediary in regional diplomacy—particularly between the West and groups like Hamas—while simultaneously funding propaganda operations designed to shape international narratives around Israel and its military actions.

The new revelations expose what appears to be an extension of that same strategy into the sphere of international law. By financing a campaign to undermine Khan’s accuser—and allegedly attempting to link her to Israel—Doha may have sought to protect both its geopolitical interests and its investments in the ICC’s prosecutorial agenda.

The Qatari regime’s sophisticated use of influence operations and private intelligence contractors mirrors tactics it has employed in other controversies, from European lobbying scandals to media manipulation. The Israel National News report noted that this latest episode fits a broader pattern: Qatar leveraging financial resources to mold political outcomes, even within institutions ostensibly dedicated to justice and human rights.

The scandal surrounding Khan and Qatar’s alleged involvement arrives at a time when the ICC’s reputation is already under unprecedented strain. Over the past year, the Court has faced accusations of bias, incompetence, and politicization from multiple corners of the international community.

As the Israel National News observed, the ICC’s record has been particularly controversial with regard to Israel, whose leaders and soldiers have repeatedly faced politically charged investigations, while egregious human rights abuses in countries such as Iran, China, and Syria often go unpunished.

The Khan scandal, Israel National News reported, has reignited long-standing debates about whether the ICC has been subverted by the same anti-Israel sentiment that pervades much of the international legal establishment. “The notion that a sitting prosecutor could be protected by a foreign government while targeting the world’s only Jewish state is not merely ironic,” one commentator told the outlet, “it’s obscene.”

Indeed, the allegations strike at the heart of the ICC’s legitimacy. The idea that the Court’s top prosecutor may have been shielded by a state sponsor of Hamas while simultaneously pursuing charges against Israeli officials paints a grim portrait of institutional decay and ideological corruption.

Khan, for his part, has temporarily stepped aside from his position, pending the outcome of the internal investigation. His legal team has categorically denied all allegations, stating that he has “never engaged in sexual misconduct of any kind.” They have suggested that the accusations are politically orchestrated attempts to discredit him following his issuance of arrest warrants for both Russian President Vladimir Putin and Israeli leaders.

Nevertheless, as the Israel National News report pointed out, the mounting evidence of Qatari interference—coupled with the timing of Khan’s prosecutorial decisions—makes it increasingly difficult to separate the personal from the political. The scandal underscores how the ICC, conceived as a beacon of impartial justice, may now be serving as a tool of geopolitical maneuvering, manipulated by states and actors seeking to weaponize its authority.

In its analysis, Israel National News concluded that the Qatar–Khan affair exposes not just the vulnerability of one man but the fragility of the entire international justice system. The use of private intelligence firms to silence accusers, the weaponization of legal proceedings to deflect accountability, and the opportunistic targeting of Israel all point to a system in moral freefall.

The ICC, once envisioned as a global tribunal above politics, has become entangled in the very power games it was created to restrain. As Professor Bayefsky told Israel National News, “This is not justice—it is theater. And behind the curtain stands a network of regimes and bureaucrats for whom truth is expendable, and the Jewish state remains the ultimate scapegoat.”

If the allegations against Khan and Qatar are proven true, the consequences could extend far beyond The Hague—casting a long shadow over international law itself and confirming what many in Israel, and increasingly in the West, have suspected all along: that the moral compass of global justice has been decisively broken.