The Assembly of States Parties (ASP) of the International Criminal Court will elect six judges in December 2026 without a completed vetting of the one qualification the Karim Khan affair made unavoidable: high moral character. The Court's own Advisory Committee on Nominations reported in August that it "could not make a conclusive determination" on the moral character of any of the twelve candidates (ICC-ASP/25/8, para. 19), while the final investigative report that would complete the check — completed at the end of July — still sits unseen by the States who will cast the ballots.

The episode lands one month after the ASP removed Karim Khan as ICC Prosecutor in July 2026 over sexual misconduct, the first such removal in the Court's history. The disciplinary process was improvised and novel enough to give Khan a plausible grievance, but the Assembly reached its own determination and acted — setting down a principle it now has to live by: serious misconduct disqualifies, even at the very top.

What the Advisory Committee found

Article 36(3)(a) of the Rome Statute requires that judges be persons of "high moral character" — a legal qualification standing in the same sentence as the competence requirement. To verify it, States Parties built a due-diligence procedure under Resolution ICC-ASP/22/Res.3, Annex II, designed to surface concerns an interview cannot reach.

This year, the procedure did not run its course. The Committee received a preliminary report from the Independent Oversight Mechanism (IOM), the Court's internal investigative body, on 11 July 2026. The final report arrived only after the Committee's session closed. In its own words, the Committee "could not make a conclusive determination" on each candidate's high moral character (para. 19), and recorded that it was "unable to fully take into account any findings or concerns arising from the report" (Annex III, Rec. 1), noting the review of misconduct allegations "remained ongoing at the time of the session" (para. 20).

Set against that admission is a sentence now being read out of context. For each candidate, in identical terms, the report pairs the open question with a second clause: the Committee's examination "through the interview" "did not put into question the high moral character of the candidate." That clause appears twelve times — a single stamp pressed down the list. Read together, the reassurance collapses: the comforting clause is tied to the interview, a test of legal competence, while the deciding clause — the misconduct review — was left open. To read any one of those paragraphs as a personal clearance is to mistake the stamp for a finding.

A safeguard narrow by design

The vetting's limits are deliberate. Under the due-diligence procedure, the screen is "intended only to assist" States and is "not in any way binding." Anonymous allegations are not accepted (Annex II, para. 16), and allegations that cannot be corroborated without a named complainant cannot readily be carried forward (para. 17).

Priyanka Chirimar, who represents complainants in the internal justice systems of international organisations, says the safeguard "overpromised and underdelivered" (interview, 25 August 2026). Her point is not that vetting is futile, but that a light instrument demands more care, not less. The IOM is a small office lodged inside the Court, sharing the building with the officials it is meant to scrutinise; across the UN system, a minority of those harassed take any formal action (Deloitte, 2019).

A further mismatch lies beneath the timing. The mechanism was never built to reach a verdict: it is an early-warning screen, a prima facie credibility check with neither the powers nor the remit of an investigation, and no disclosed evidentiary standard for what "substantiated" means. In the Prosecutor's own case, the advisory panel reviewing the misconduct findings applied a "beyond reasonable doubt" threshold drawn from international administrative-tribunal practice — a use Heller has defended and Roth has sharply contested, stressing that an inability to meet that bar cannot be treated as exoneration where the investigation made no underlying credibility findings.

The pattern, and what follows

Purna Sen, an institutional sexual-harassment specialist who served as the ICC Prosecutor's Special Adviser on Working Climate, was asked whether she could name a single case in which a powerful man was removed or kept out for sexual misconduct alone. Her answer, given in writing on 19 August 2026, was one word: No. Misconduct sometimes costs powerful men their posts, but rarely on its own; the cases that end in removal are the ones that became impossible to contain. A quiet, unwatched election is exactly where the safeguard lapses.

The problem does not end with December's vote. The same due-diligence procedure governs vetting of candidates for Prosecutor and Deputy Prosecutor (Res.3, para. 81). The mechanism that could not deliver its findings in time for the bench will vet the office the Court has just had to empty for misconduct.

Practical consequences for practitioners

For practitioners and delegations, the operative question is procedural. Under Annex II, para. 23, the IOM's report goes to the Presidency of the Assembly, with a copy to the Committee's Chair; where it flags concerns about a candidate's character, the Presidency puts it to the Bureau and may recommend briefing States Parties on its contents (para. 29). The route to the electors is already written into the rules. States voting in December will do so, unless that route is used, with the one document that speaks to character — the IOM's completed findings — missing from the table. A completed report that never reaches States before December is, for the election, worth no more than one that never existed.

The demand, as framed by the source analysis, reduces to three words: the process should be transparent, predictable, and trustworthy. This December will show whether the Court can clear even that.