Documents leaked from within the International Criminal Court (ICC) have shown how its chief prosecutor, Luis Moreno Ocampo, was not shy about seeking the help of the rich and famous in his work to hunt down war criminals around the world.

The disclosures, part of a haul of 40,000 documents obtained by the French investigative website Madiapart and seen by The Sunday Times, reveal his contact with the Hollywood stars George Clooney and Sean Penn, as well as the wife of the founder of eBay.

Moreno Ocampo asked Clooney, the co-founder of a project that used commercial satellites to fly over South Sudan gathering evidence of war crimes, for help investigating atrocities committed by Colonel Muammar Gadaffi’s regime in Libya during the 2011 civil war.