Del Ponte, Carla

Carla del Ponte was born in 1947 in the city of Lugano in the Italian-speaking part of Switzerland. She studied law at the universities of Bern , Geneva and London . In 1972 she received a master 's degree in law and got a job in one of the law firms. In 1975, she opened her own law firm ^[1] .

In 1981, del Ponte began working in the office of the district attorney for Lugano. For investigations related to money laundering , arms smuggling, international drug trafficking, as well as for the uncompromising fight against organized crime in general, she received the nickname "Carlita-Plague" ( Italian: Carlita La Pesta ) ^[2] . She led her work in close contact with the Italian judge Giovanni Falcone , who died in 1992 from an explosion organized by the Sicilian mafia ^[3] .

In 1994, del Ponte was appointed to the post of Attorney General of Switzerland. She was widely known in Russia for the suspicion of corruption among the first president of the Russian Federation, Boris Yeltsin (known as the “ Mabetex case ”): it was alleged that representatives of the Russian leadership received bribes from a Swiss construction company headed by future president of the Republic of Kosovo, Behjet Pacolli , who received a large contract for the reconstruction of the buildings of the Moscow Kremlin ^[1] . This was not her only high-profile case as the prosecutor general: she also froze the accounts of the former Prime Minister of Pakistan Benazir Bhutto and secured the arrest of 118 million dollars in the accounts of ex-President of Mexico Raul Salinas’s brother ^[3] .

In August 1999, the UN Security Council appointed her to the post of prosecutor at the International Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia (ICTY), which investigated war crimes during the Balkan conflicts, as well as the International Tribunal for Rwanda (ICTR), which investigated the genocide in Rwanda . In these positions, she succeeded Louise Arbor ^[1] .

In 2003 , not having achieved significant success in the MTP, del Ponte devoted herself entirely to the cause of the former Yugoslavia. Hearings of the prosecution continued from 2002 to 2004, and in August, hearings of the defense began. The main defendant, Slobodan Milosevic , refused a lawyer and represented himself. The ICTY hearings were repeatedly interrupted due to the defendant's deteriorating health, and in March 2006 Milosevic died in prison from heart failure ^[4] . It was not possible to prove his guilt. After that, the prosecutor’s attention was switched to the leaders of the Bosnian Serbs Ratko Mladic and Radovan Karadzic , accused of massacres in Srebrenica . ^[1] Ratko Mladic was caught by Serbian secret services and extradited to the Hague Tribunal in June 2011.

As a result, on January 30, 2007, del Ponte left her post as prosecutor in the ICTY. From 2008 to 2011, she served as Ambassador of Switzerland to Argentina ^[5] .

In 2008, del Ponte released the book “The Hunt. I and war criminals ”, which tells about cases of cutting and selling organs from living Serbian prisoners by Kosovo Albanians ^[6] . In addition, in her book, she accuses the opposition to the tribunal not only of Moscow and Belgrade, but also of the CIA, UN, Washington and NATO ^[7] .

From September 2012 to August 2017, del Ponte was a member of the international commission of inquiry into the events in Syria under the auspices of the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights ^[8] . In May 2013, she stated that it was anti-government groups that used chemical weapons during the civil war . This opinion was diametrically opposed to the opinion of most European politicians who accused government forces of using chemical weapons ^[9] . On August 6, 2017, she resigned as a member of the commission due to the fact that the UN Security Council does not give way to the materials of the commission ^[10] .

Del Ponte was married, now divorced. Has a son, about whom practically nothing is known ^[1] .

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