A Facebook post claiming that the International Criminal Court (ICC) prosecutor, Karim Khan, ‘has thrown away’ a case against Kenya’s Deputy President William Ruto is FALSE.

Dated 13 August 2021, the post adds that Khan reached the decision because there is no evidence and whoever filed it went missing “​​after realizing how unsupported (the) case was”.

However, the contents of the post are inaccurate. The case against DP Ruto and the former head of operations at Kass FM, Joshua Sang, was terminated on 5 April 2016.

This decision does not preclude new prosecution and may be subject to appeal,” part of the ruling reads.

Presiding Judge Chile Eboe-Osuji and Judge Robert Fremr agreed that the charges against Ruto and Sang should be vacated and the accused discharged.

In their ruling, all but one of the judges said the prosecution did not provide enough evidence to warrant the trial chamber’s conviction.

Ruto and Sang were facing charges of committing crimes against humanity. The said crimes were allegedly committed during the 2007–2008 post-election violence period in Kenya.

British lawyer Karim Khan represented DP Ruto at the ICC until the termination of the case in 2016. Khan was elected as the ICC prosecutor on 12 February 2021, and sworn in on 16 June 2021. He succeeded Gambian lawyer Fatou Bensouda.

PesaCheck has looked into a Facebook post claiming that the International Criminal Court (ICC) prosecutor, Karim Khan, has thrown away Kenya’s Deputy President William Ruto’s case because of lack of evidence and finds it to be FALSE.

This post is part of an ongoing series of PesaCheck fact-checks examining content marked as potential misinformation on Facebook and other social media platforms.

By partnering with Facebook and similar social media platforms, third-party fact-checking organisations like PesaCheck are helping to sort fact from fiction. We do this by giving the public deeper insight and context to posts they see in their social media feeds.

Have you spotted what you think is fake or false information on Facebook? Here’s how you can report. And, here’s more information on PesaCheck’s methodology for fact-checking questionable content.

This fact-check was written by PesaCheck fact-checker Naomi Wanjiku and edited by PesaCheck chief copy editor Rose Lukalo. The article was approved for publication by managing editor Enock Nyariki.

PesaCheck is East Africa’s first public finance fact-checking initiative. It was co-founded by Catherine Gicheru and Justin Arenstein, and is being incubated by the continent’s largest civic technology and data journalism accelerator: Code for Africa. It seeks to help the public separate fact from fiction in public pronouncements about the numbers that shape our world, with a special emphasis on pronouncements about public finances that shape government’s delivery of Sustainable Development Goals (SDG) public services, such as healthcare, rural development and access to water / sanitation. PesaCheck also tests the accuracy of media reportage. To find out more about the project, visit pesacheck.org.

PesaCheck is an initiative of Code for Africa, through its innovateAFRICA fund, with support from Deutsche Welle Akademie, in partnership with a coalition of local African media and other civic watchdog organisations.