Any attempt to re-open litigation of the matter would undermine the integrity of the Institution and the rule of law.
– Abdul Koroma
So declares former International Court of Justice judge Abdul Koroma, according to the Middle East Eye (MEE), in a seven-page “opinion” (as characterized) concerning the disciplinary proceedings involving the embattled and currently leave-bound ICC Prosecutor Karim A. A. Khan KC.
At this stage, L’Affaire Khan resembles less a serious disciplinary process than a carefully managed media campaign wrapped in legal jargon, institutional symbolism, and selectively deployed prestige. The latest installment is particularly remarkable – even faintly farcical.
Based on MEE’s reporting, which claims to have reviewed the “Koroma Opinion,” Khan – who in recent weeks has embarked on what has been described as an “exoneration media tour” – now appears to be indirectly leveraging the stature of a former ICJ judge to exert pressure not merely on the Bureau but effectively on the Assembly of States Parties (“ASP”).
Is the timing entirely coincidental?
Roughly a week or so before disciplinary proceedings are expected to move toward a vote, a conveniently publicized “opinion” suddenly appears, warning State Parties that proceeding against Khan could expose the institution to reversal, reputational embarrassment, reinstatement orders, findings of procedural illegality, and potentially massive financial liability.
If not coincidental, one would have to admire the choreography.
Before getting to the substance of the so-called “Koroma Opinion,” however, it is worth lingering over one rather inconvenient detail.
MEE – which has emerged as a conspicuously well-positioned recipient of developments, leaks, and narrative framing favorable to Khan throughout L’Affaire Khan – was eager to underscore the memorandum’s authority, describing Abdul Koroma as having “served as a judge of the International Court of Justice (ICJ) from 1994 to 2012, was previously a member of the UN International Law Commission, and has sat on the administrative tribunals of the World Bank and the African Development Bank.”
An impressive pedigree. Precisely the kind of pedigree capable of intimidating bureaucrats, impressing diplomats, and lending judicial perfume to what is otherwise – at least on its face – simply a strategically leaked memorandum appearing days before a politically sensitive disciplinary vote.
But there is one supposedly minor detail that is rather delicately absent from the public presentation.
Koroma is no longer an ICJ judge. Those robes were hung up long ago. These days, he practices at Temple Garden Chambers (“TGC”) in London, where he is described as “a very senior and leading international lawyer and arbitrator” and as an Honorary Bencher of Lincoln’s Inn.
And who else, one might reasonably wonder, happens to be at Temple Garden Chambers? Why, none other than Karim Khan KC himself, together with his wife, Shyamala Alagendra. Naturally, we are expected to regard this as entirely meaningless, wholly coincidental, and utterly devoid of any possible relevance. Correlation, after all, is not causation – a principle that somehow becomes increasingly important the more convenient the coincidence appears, particularly when the coincidence itself goes curiously unmentioned.
Temple Garden Chambers is, of course, perfectly entitled to boast about Koroma’s extraordinary résumé: former ICJ judge, former chair of the International Law Commission, former chair of the UN General Assembly Sixth Committee (Legal), former ambassador, adviser, arbitrator, and veteran of countless international institutions. And why not? A former ICJ judge is an extraordinary institutional asset for any chambers. The cachet alone is invaluable.
Which is precisely why this matters. Once one moves beyond the carefully curated aura of judicial authority surrounding the “opinion,” a rather awkward question emerges: whose “opinion” are we actually reading?
The detached reflections of a retired international judge independently and spontaneously concerned with institutional legality?
Or
An advocacy constructed within overlapping professional and personal networks orbiting Khan himself, then wrapped in the prestige and authority of a former ICJ judgeship?
To put it somewhat less delicately: are we dealing with neutral legal analysis, or a strategically commissioned and possibly well-remunerated piece of advocacy delivered under the imprimatur of a distinguished stalwart of international law as part of Khan’s latest line of defence?
With the greatest respect for the former judge, this question is neither improper nor cynical. It is unavoidable. Matters only become more uncomfortable when one turns to the actual legal substance reportedly advanced by Koroma.
According to the reporting, Koroma concludes that Khan’s prospects of successfully challenging dismissal or disciplinary action before the International Labour Organization Administrative Tribunal (“ILOAT”) are “considerable,” and that the Bureau should therefore accept the conclusions of what is repeatedly described as a “judicial panel” that supposedly found no wrongdoing.
There are, however, several immediate problems with this framing. I have discussed them before (here, here, here, here), but they are sufficiently important to warrant repeating because these distinctions are critical to any honest representation of what the three-member expert panel actually did – and, equally importantly, what it did not do.
To begin with, this was not a judicial panel. The panelists did not act as judges. They were not sworn in as judges. No adversarial proceedings occurred. Witnesses were not examined, and evidence was not judicially tested. No judicial findings were rendered, and no binding decision emerged from a recognized adjudicative process. No formal pronouncement of “exoneration” was issued. Calling it a “judicial panel” is not merely imprecise. It is fundamentally misleading. Above all, it is statutorily non-binding.
Koroma has not been commissioned by the Bureau, the ASP, the ICC Registrar, or the Office of the Prosecutor. He is not serving under any formal mandate. He is not issuing an opinion on behalf of any judicial institution. Indeed, one may reasonably question whether circulating such an “opinion” without clarifying its provenance during pending disciplinary proceedings is entirely appropriate.
At best – at least from what is being reported (and perhaps more importantly, from what is not being reported) – this appears, from the Bureau’s and the ASP’s perspective, to be an unsolicited document authored by a former judge, lending his prestige and bona fides to a politically charged dispute and strategically circulated immediately before a sensitive disciplinary vote.
Let’s be serious. This may well have been unsolicited by the Bureau and the ASP, but it could well be seen to have been solicited by someone.
Legally, there is one glaring problem with the “Koroma Opinion” that deserves far more attention than it has received so far. The “Opinion” – at least as reported – appears to assume that Khan would have relatively straightforward access to the ILOAT should the ASP proceed with disciplinary measures or removal proceedings. That assumption is legally fraught.
It sidesteps one of the central unresolved jurisdictional entanglements in the entire affair: whether elected officials of the ICC enjoy unrestricted access to ILOAT, as ordinary staff members do. Whether and to what extent an elected official may invoke ILOAT’s jurisdiction in relation to disciplinary proceedings under Articles 46 and 47 of the Rome Statute remains far from settled.
By simply – or conveniently – skating past this problem, the former judge does himself no service. The omission cannot but raise the question of whether this is a detached, fully balanced expert assessment, or a partisan advocacy by an erstwhile judge, dressed in robes that have been moldering in a closet for nearly a decade and a half?
The foundational authority on ILOAT’s personal jurisdiction over ICC elected officials is Judgment No. 3359, in which the Tribunal accepted jurisdiction over complaints filed by two ICC judges. That judgment established an important distinction between the ILOAT system and the United Nations internal justice system.
ILOAT’s Statute uses the broader term “officials” to define who may invoke its jurisdiction. This is materially different from the UN Appeals Tribunal framework, which limits access to “staff members.” ICC judges – as elected officials – were therefore held to fall within ILOAT’s ratione personae jurisdiction.
This distinction was later expressly acknowledged by the UN Appeals Tribunal in 2019-UNAT-921 (Mindua), where the Tribunal recognized that ILOAT’s jurisdictional language is broader precisely because it extends to “officials,” including judges, whereas the jurisdiction of UNDT and UNAT is confined to staff members.
The practical consequence is significant. ICC elected officials are not categorically barred from accessing ILOAT. The personal jurisdiction gate is not entirely closed to them. But that is not the end of the matter. The determinative question is not merely who is complaining. The real question is what they are complaining about. Here is precisely where the “Koroma Opinion,” at least as publicly described, appears astonishingly underdeveloped.
The Rome Statute establishes a highly specific framework for the discipline and removal of elected officials under Articles 46 and 47. These provisions are not ordinary employment-law mechanisms. They are treaty-based constitutional accountability provisions that govern the discipline and removal of elected office-holders within an international organization. This distinction is critical. The Rome Statute is both lex superior and lex specialis.
As lex superior, the Rome Statute sits above the ICC’s internal Staff Regulations and Rules, as well as the separate instrument through which the ICC recognized ILOAT’s jurisdiction. Where the Statute establishes a tailored accountability regime for elected officials, that treaty-level framework necessarily prevails over generalized administrative-law mechanisms. ILOAT cannot simply arrogate to itself jurisdiction over matters that the Rome Statute has expressly allocated elsewhere.
At the same time, Articles 46 and 47 serve as lex specialis – the specific legal regime crafted for this category of office-holder and this category of decision. The ASP disciplinary framework for elected officials is not peripheral to the ICC’s constitutional architecture; it is integral to it. That tailored regime therefore displaces generalized employment-law principles that might otherwise govern ordinary administrative disputes.
This position is reinforced by the ICC’s own policy framework governing investigations involving elected officials, which in turn defers to the ASP and the Rules of Procedure and Evidence for procedural clarity in disciplinary matters involving elected office-holders.
What remains unresolved in the jurisprudence is whether an elected official subject to Articles 46/47 proceedings could seek to recharacterize the dispute as a more general breach of conditions of service – for example, by alleging that procedural irregularities in the disciplinary process independently engage rights under the Staff Regulations or internal administrative norms.
If such a claim were advanced, ILOAT would likely be required to look beyond the dispute’s formal classification and examine its véritable objet – its true substance – as it does in other admissibility contexts. The Tribunal would then need to determine whether the complaint genuinely concerns independent employment rights or, in substance, is an indirect attempt to challenge a Rome Statute disciplinary determination through administrative-law framing.
This question remains unresolved.
It follows that Khan’s ability to invoke ILOAT’s jurisdiction over ASP disciplinary proceedings is, at a minimum, an open and contestable legal issue – not the settled proposition the “Koroma Opinion” reportedly suggests. Whether ILOAT would ultimately accept such jurisdiction, reject it outright, or treat such a claim as an impermissible circumvention of the Rome Statute’s lex superior and lex specialis framework is a matter only the Tribunal itself can determine.
Put differently, the issue is far from settled, despite how confidently it is sometimes presented. This makes Koroma’s rhetoric about catastrophic damages and inevitable reversal all the more difficult to take at face value.
There is something distinctly unedifying, even distasteful, about the suggestion that the ASP should be effectively warned off a disciplinary decision involving allegations of sexual assault against the Prosecutor of the International Criminal Court by invoking speculative financial exposure. Stripped of its legal packaging, the underlying message is difficult to miss: better to retain a potentially deeply compromised office-holder than risk monetary consequences on the order of €1.5 million.
That is not legal analysis. It is the deployment of the prospect of substantial financial liability – potentially exceeding €1.5 million – to steer institutional decision-making, with an unmistakable undertone of “decide this way or face the consequences,” repackaged as prudence.
It also misses the central point entirely.
Khan repeatedly frames the situation as if he is being subjected to an unprecedented or selectively engineered process. But that framing does not withstand scrutiny. The genuinely distinguishing feature here is not any differential treatment of Khan. It is the unprecedented nature of the allegations themselves.
The ICC’s institutional architecture has not previously been required to process allegations of sexual misconduct of this gravity against a sitting elected official at this level. That fact precisely explains why the system appears strained, improvised, and at times ill-fitting.
Whatever one thinks about adapting or adjusting procedural mechanisms in response to such allegations – and I remain skeptical that ad hoc modification is legally sound – these questions arise because the allegations themselves have plainly unsettled even seasoned observers of the ICC. They are not routine. They are not marginal. And they cannot be treated as if they were.
This is, in a very real sense, precisely the category of conduct the ICC’s screening and vetting mechanisms were designed to guard against: situations in which questions of “high moral character” shift from abstract eligibility criteria to a concrete institutional crisis.
Ironically, the episode may ultimately expose not only weaknesses in disciplinary procedures but also deeper vulnerabilities in the election and vetting architecture itself. With six judicial elections scheduled for December 2026, that ought to concern the Assembly of States Parties far more than speculative damage calculations floated through strategically timed “opinions.”
But let us return to the broader choreography surrounding this affair.
Cui bono?
Who benefits?
One cannot but wonder whether this document simply materialized spontaneously out of detached scholarly concern for institutional due process.
It is fair to ask whether this “opinion” was solicited, encouraged, facilitated, circulated, or otherwise midwifed by individuals closely aligned with Khan: perhaps members of his legal team; perhaps loyal acolytes; perhaps his spouse (herself reportedly implicated in allegations of witness interference); perhaps his increasingly omnipresent ex-special adviser-cum-consigliere, Professor Kevin Jon Heller, whose public role increasingly resembles that of an agent deployed against critics and skeptics alike; or perhaps even sympathetic State Parties politically invested in Khan’s survival. I do not accuse or pretend to know, but these questions need to be asked.
Call me cynical if you wish. But the timing, the coordinated leak, the substantive framing, and the Cassandra-like warnings of reversal, reinstatement, reputational catastrophe, and significant financial liability do not feel accidental. The convergence should not be ignored.
What is publicly presented carries all the aesthetic trappings of judicial authority while possessing none of its institutional force. And that, in many respects, would seem to be precisely the point.
Once one moves past the carefully curated aura of judicial gravitas surrounding this suddenly surfaced “Koroma Opinion,” a more prosaic reality emerges.
The document did not descend from Mount Sinai. It is not farfetched to wonder whether: Someone approached Koroma. Someone supplied information. Someone framed the issues. Someone assisted – directly or indirectly – with research, drafting, refinement, or timing. Someone ensured its strategic circulation to the press immediately ahead of a politically sensitive vote.
Under all the circumstances, it would be irresponsible for the ASP and the public not to be asking these questions.
The objective no longer appears difficult to discern. It is not adjudication. It is pressure. Or, more politely, “institutional persuasion” through borrowed prestige. Once that becomes visible, questions abound – not speculative, but structural.
Questions inevitably follow, falling into four interlocking categories.
I. Origins, Commissioning, and Coordination
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- Who first approached Abdul Koroma?
- Who defined the scope or framing of the request?
- Why Koroma, and why now?
- Was the approach routed through professional or institutional networks connected to Khan or his broader orbit?
- Was this a genuinely independent intervention, or strategically commissioned advocacy clothed in judicial prestige?
- Was any form of compensation, benefit, or inducement involved — financial or otherwise — and if so, by whom?
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II. Information and Framing
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- Was Koroma given access to the full OIOS investigative record?
- Did he review the full panel materials or only selected excerpts?
- Who curated and selected the material provided?
- What narrative framing accompanied it?
- Was exculpatory or contrary material included?
- Or was the “opinion” constructed on a filtered record designed to produce a predictable conclusion?
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At this stage, the issue is not interpretation. It is informational integrity.
III. Drafting, Assistance, and Authorship
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- Did Koroma personally conduct the legal research and drafting?
- Or was substantive assistance provided?
- Were draft memoranda prepared externally and later adopted or refined?
- By whom?
- Whose legal theory is actually embedded in the analysis?
- Was this an independent judicial reflection — or a collaboratively engineered advocacy product subsequently laundered through the prestige of a former ICJ judge?
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This is not cynicism. It is a basic question of authorship and epistemic reliability.
IV. The Leak and Its Timing
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- Who leaked the memorandum to MEE?
- Why this outlet?
- Why at this precise procedural moment?
- Was the leak coordinated with wider communications or reputational strategy?
- Why has the full text not been released publicly? If this is genuine neutral legal analysis, why selectively disclose only those portions most likely to exert institutional pressure ahead of a vote?
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The pattern, taken together, is difficult to ignore.
Each question, taken in isolation, may well be defensible. Taken together, it is fair to ask whether they begin to resemble something else: not a legal intervention in the strict sense, but a structured narrative event designed to influence perception at a decisive institutional moment. The broader implications matter.
Like Shakespeare’s Marc Antony, I do not come to bury or to praise Karim Kahn, his supporters or former Judge Koroma. I assume they are all honorable men and women, but questions need be asked.
PARTING THOUGHTS: The Institutional Stakes
A legal analysis is only as reliable as the factual record on which it rests.
Again, neither the MEE reporting nor the conveniently leaked “Koroma Opinion” feels accidental. The timing is too convenient. The framing is too precise. The messaging is too strategically aligned. It comes after weeks of increasingly public efforts by Khan and those orbiting him to portray him not merely as innocent, but as fully “exonerated” – despite the absence of any judicial exoneration whatsoever.
An observer might be concerned that there is a strategy to: transform a non-binding expert report into the functional equivalent of a judicial acquittal, then portray any further scrutiny as illegitimate, unlawful, politically motivated, or institutionally reckless. The “Koroma Opinion” could be seen to appear carefully designed to reinforce precisely that narrative. That is why this matters far beyond a single leaked document.
Ultimately, the problem is not Abdul Koroma himself. Former judges are free to express opinions. They are also free to pursue private legal practice and take on gainful commissioned work. However, integrity and transparency require that they disclose any incentives, assistance or relationships when branding their opinions with the legitimacy of their former roles.
The problem is the increasingly visible attempt to wrap what appears to be a coordinated political and media strategy in the aesthetic authority of judicial legitimacy. That distinction matters. Once disciplinary proceedings involving the Prosecutor of the International Criminal Court begin to rely on carefully timed leaks, media-amplified legal threats, apparently orchestrated “expert opinions,” reputational pressure campaigns, and the strategic deployment of former judges warning of institutional catastrophe unless proceedings cease, the process itself begins to look less like impartial governance and more like institutional theater.
Institutions do not preserve legitimacy by appearing intimidated. Nor do they preserve legitimacy by allowing non-binding expert processes to be rhetorically recast as fictional judicial acquittals. At some point, the issue ceases to be whether Khan is ultimately innocent or guilty of the allegations against him. The issue becomes whether the ICC’s disciplinary mechanisms can operate free from carefully orchestrated pressure campaigns disguised as neutral legal concern.
The more this affair unfolds, the less one sees genuine investment by Khan and those orbiting him in detached institutional legality, and the more one might see tactical maneuvering aimed at reputation management through leaked memoranda, media choreography, borrowed judicial prestige, and strategic warnings of catastrophe should scrutiny continue. That – far more than speculative damages calculations floated through conveniently timed “opinions” – should concern the States Parties.
Institutions do not lose legitimacy merely because allegations are made against powerful officials. They lose legitimacy when observers suspect that entirely different rules apply once the official in question is sufficiently powerful, sufficiently connected, or sufficiently institutionally valuable.
This, ultimately, is the danger here. Not simply the allegations themselves. Not even the procedural controversies surrounding them. But the growing appearance that institutional power, elite networks, reputational management, and carefully curated legal theater – all orchestrated by a well-resourced man at the center – may displace transparent and credible institutional accountability.
Ironically – and perhaps tragically – if confidence in the ICC is ultimately damaged by this affair, it may not be because the allegations were investigated, but because too many people appeared determined to ensure they were not.
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