"Borrowed robes": how a prosecutor's legacy became a lobbyist's calling card

Author: Fuad Abdullayev, leading adviser at the Center of Analysis of International Relations and Multiculturalism

Source: the international platform The Liberum

U.S. Secretary of State Marco Rubio stated on July 13 that Washington would "dismantle the ICC [International Criminal Court] brick by brick if necessary," accusing the court of waging "lawfare" against American citizens.

Shortly afterward, the court's states parties voted to remove its chief prosecutor Karim Khan, who had been suspended from his duties in June following a UN-led investigation into allegations of sexual harassment. Judges filed lawsuits against the U.S. government over the sanctions imposed on them. Against this backdrop, the story of Luis Moreno Ocampo, the first chief prosecutor of the International Criminal Court, deserves particular attention.

The International Criminal Court — an institution founded on the promise of impartial accountability — is going through the most turbulent period of its 24-year existence. It is precisely in this context that Ocampo's story merits far closer scrutiny than it has received so far. This is not about passing a guilty verdict on the ICC itself, but about understanding what happens when the authority of a weakened institution becomes available for private use.

Ocampo headed the Office of the Prosecutor from 2003 to 2012. His time in that post is remembered above all for the collapse of the cases in Kenya: the charges against Uhuru Kenyatta were dropped, the cases against William Ruto were terminated, and a subsequent external review revealed shortcomings in his decisions as prosecutor.

Even commentators sympathetic to Washington's current campaign against the court have pointed to his activities as one of the early signs of the crisis of confidence in the ICC. In an article published this month in Newsweek, American expert Ilan Berman of the Council on Foreign Policy noted that Ocampo "was criticized during his tenure" and "continued to find himself at the center of scandals after leaving the ICC."

Cited as an example was his controversial intervention in the conflict between Armenia and Azerbaijan.

There is also a financial side to this story. Investigations by the European Investigative Collaborations network and the German magazine Der Spiegel established that during his work as chief prosecutor and after leaving the post, Ocampo managed offshore structures registered in Panama and the British Virgin Islands, and that shortly after leaving office, tens of thousands of dollars were transferred to his accounts in Switzerland.

He later concluded a consulting contract, reportedly valued at three million dollars plus five thousand dollars for each working day, with the Libyan oil magnate Hassan Tatanaki, who financed the militias of General Khalifa Haftar, which had been accused of extrajudicial killings.

Asked to explain this arrangement, Ocampo answered simply: his salary in The Hague had not been enough. It was precisely this track record — a former champion of international justice who turned his connections and professional status into a source of income — that preceded his appearance in South Caucasus affairs.

This story began in August 2023, when Ocampo accepted a commission from representatives of the Armenian separatists in the Karabakh region, at that time occupied by Azerbaijan, and other parties linked to Armenia, after which he came forward with accusations against Azerbaijan.

On July 30, 2023, he later acknowledged on social media that his opinion had been commissioned by the self-proclaimed "president" of the now-abolished separatist regime in Karabakh — a structure unlawfully created by Armenia in the 1990s following ethnic cleansing that drove hundreds of thousands of Azerbaijanis from their homes. Ocampo then accused Azerbaijan of committing grave violations against the region's Armenian population, at times using language as serious as "genocide."

This was not an isolated statement. In the following months he repeatedly reiterated similar accusations in interviews, opinion pieces, and public appearances, forming a sustained campaign of accusations against Baku.

What might have remained just one of many contentious documents took on an entirely different dimension after the Azerbaijani outlet Minval Politika published video recordings on April 30, 2026. In them, Ocampo says that a former aide to the ex-head of the EU's foreign policy service, Josep Borrell, now "works for me" in the European Parliament, where he is engaged in pressuring European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen and advancing a case in the European Court aimed at annulling the EU's energy partnership with Azerbaijan.

His son Thomas states that the network's goal is to remove Armenian Prime Minister Nikol Pashinyan from power in coordination with Armenian lobbying organizations in the United States that oppose Pashinyan's peace agenda in relations with Azerbaijan. Whatever the origin of these video recordings, their content settles a question that should never have arisen at all: a paid and coordinated influence campaign is not legal expertise, no matter how many Hague credentials appear on the letterhead.

None of this casts a shadow on international criminal justice as an idea, nor should it be perceived that way. The majority of the court's staff carry out their work in good faith, and the very idea of holding those responsible for the gravest crimes accountable remains as compelling as it was in 1998.

It is precisely the institution's authority that determines the market value of a man like Ocampo. That authority is weakening at the very moment when he and others are actively exploiting it for their own benefit. The court has no police of its own; it depends entirely on states parties, which are supposed to arrest suspects, and those states are increasingly refusing to do so.

Critics point out that over more than two decades the court has handed down fewer than 15 convictions, that the cases have predominantly involved defendants from Africa, and that now its leadership has become embroiled in a scandal that led to the suspension of the sitting prosecutor.

A court forced to fight for its own institutional survival accordingly has fewer means to control how its former officials use the court's name after leaving office. It is precisely this gap that Ocampo's activities have filled.

The consequences extend far beyond a single individual. European institutions that cited his 2023 opinion, as well as parliamentary resolutions that reproduced his wording, would do well to ask themselves: were they relying on an independent legal assessment, or were they in fact amplifying the dissemination of commissioned material?

Media outlets that gave this opinion broad and uncritical coverage should now revise their assessment in light of the commercial and political context that has become public.

The ICC, already occupied with defending the court against unprecedented pressure from the United States, could consider one more institutional reform: establishing clearer requirements for the conduct of former prosecutors and judges after the end of their mandates, so that the authority earned through years of service in the institution cannot simply be sold to the highest bidder once the office has been vacated.