The British chief prosecutor of the International Criminal Court has confirmed he would cooperate with an inquiry into the April 2024 phone call between himself and then-British Foreign Secretary David Cameron, in which he has said Cameron threatened to defund the ICC if he pursued arrest warrants for Israeli officials.
Karim Khan revealed details of his call with Cameron, a former British prime minister who is now a peer in the House of Lords, in an exclusive interview with Middle East Eye this week.
MEE first reported last June that on 23 April 2024, weeks before Khan applied for arrest warrants for Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and his then-Defence Minister Yoav Gallant, Cameron phoned Khan and threatened that the UK would defund and withdraw from the ICC if it issued warrants for Israeli leaders.
Since then, numerous British MPs have urged a Foreign Office investigation into the call and a Foreign Affairs Select Committee inquiry.
The Foreign Office has repeatedly refused to comment on the matter.
Speaking to MEE this week, Khan would not say whether he thought there should be a British government investigation into the call.
However, the prosecutor confirmed that if the Foreign Affairs Select Committee held an inquiry into the phone call and asked him to give evidence, “of course I would consider it and cooperate".
He described the conversation with Cameron as “difficult”.
Khan said Cameron had told him “that I'd lost the plot, or I'd be thought to have lost the plot if we went forward [with the warrants] in the way that he had heard.
"There were a number of questions that were posed, and consequences were, or likely consequences, were conveyed to me in what was a difficult conversation.”
MEE reported last year that Cameron told Khan that issuing the warrants would be like dropping a "hydrogen bomb" and that the UK would “defund the court and withdraw from the Rome Statute”.
Khan said: “Clearly, [Cameron] was unhappy with what he had heard and that it was going to cause difficulties from his perspective.
“And, you know, I was left in no doubt that, of course, the UK is one of the biggest funders of the court, and the United Kingdom, his [Conservative] party, the governing party at the time, as he put it, and also the United States, may think that I would lose the dressing room, in the political dressing room. That would lead to some difficulties.
Leading international law experts have told MEE that Cameron's alleged behaviour could constitute a criminal offence under Article 70 of the Rome Statute, which prohibits interference with the administration of justice.
"A threat against the ICC, direct or indirect, is an obstruction of justice," Francesca Albanese, the UN's special rapporteur on Palestine, said last year.
"It's incredibly serious that someone in a position of power might have had the audacity to do that."
“I love this country and I'm a great admirer of the British legal system," he said.
"I owe everything to it. I'm very proud to be a member of the bar. And I think the United Kingdom, if it stands for anything, it stands for the law.”
Khan went on: “We're no longer the huge military power that we were… economically and post-Brexit we're in a certain place. We have remarkable men and women in this country and there's a spirit of fairness, there's a spirit of fair play, and there's something that actually should never be lost, or it should be repaired, which is fidelity to international agreements and international treaties.
“Because if your word is your bond, that's exactly what applies at the international level. So I felt very sad when I had that conversation, because from somebody that was a former prime minister, I expected more.
