8/3/2023 0 Comments Call carla![]() She was soon appointed public prosecutor and carved the tracks of her career when seconded to the 'Pizza Connection' Mafia investigation, crossing a perilous line by decoding numerical Swiss accounts held by the Cosa Nostra. Somewhere along the way, she married and divorced a man about whom she will say nothing, and gave birth to a son about whom she says little. Oh to have been a fly on the wall when she came though Washington last year to confront her main critic in the US, Jesse Helms of the Foreign Affairs Committee and heavy-hitter for the tobacco lobby.ĭel Ponte was born in Lugano in 1947, and began practising law in her hometown. She is a powerhouse a little over five feet tall and lights one cigarette from the other. The first things you notice about Carla del Ponte are her height and the cigarettes. She was the only figure in Swiss pubic life with a 24-hour personal armed guard. And what a prosecutor she was: a woman who, as she puts it herself, 'never served anyone or anything but the law', and a woman with enemies a veteran of the war through the courts against the Cosa Nostra, the Russian Mafia, Swiss bank secrecy, Colombian drug cartels and more. But it is impossible for the world not to associate the conviction with del Ponte and the success of the prosecution's case with the feminisation of The Hague tribunal.Ĭarla del Ponte is third in a line of formidable women at The Hague - the others were the judge in the first case who became its president, Gabrielle Kirk MacDonald, a black civil rights judge from Texas and judge Louise Arbour of Canada, whom del Ponte replaced in September 1999.ĭel Ponte was the first career prosecutor to step into the prosecutor's shoes. The investigation was made by a tenacious American female attorney, Nancy Patterson, and the verdict delivered by a female judge, Florence Mumba of Zambia. The then UN envoy David Owen, when pressed in Sarajevo to draft a response, said: 'It's very difficult to talk to the Serbs about this kind of thing.' Others seemed to find it hard to deal with. But the central and sole conviction for mass rape in Foca ended once and for all grotesque doubts that some had sought to cast over the veracity of the accounts of women raped in Bosnia, which first surfaced in 1992. ![]() Systematic rape was also a component part in the conviction for genocide of Jean-Paul Akayesu, a Hutu leader in the Rwanda genocide, at the Arusha court last year. The Foca verdict came on the slipstream of two civil suits against an absentee Radovan Kadadzic filed through New York by women who had been raped at the Omarska concentration camp, in which the juries asked the judge for permission to award up to 10 times the maximum damages allowed. If The Hague was conceived as proceeding in the traditions of Nuremberg, this was a crime of which the male world of those trials had not even attempted to convict the Nazis, for all the copious evidence available. Here was not only justice being done, but justice being played in a new, female key painted in new, female colours that depicted rape as a tool of war and crime against humanity. ![]() Three Bosnian Serbs from Foca were convicted in the first ever war crimes trial dealing exclusively with sexual offences - charges that seared the imagination of even the most hardened of lawyers or war reporters the systematic mass rape and torture of captive women and young girls. The conviction was secured last week of its most senior defendant, the Bosnian Croat political commander Dario Kordic, for directing a series of horrific massacres of Muslims along the Lasva valley, and his aide-de-camp.īut far more significant, last month came a piece of history in our lifetime. Suddenly, the court has become a judicial bowling alley, defendants going down like skittles. The diabolical triad of prize indictees - Milosevic, Radovan Karadzic and Ratko Mladic - remain at liberty.īut some epic events have occurred at The Hague of late, which bear the unmistakable hallmark of Carla del Ponte. It took nearly two years to hear the first case and the defendant in the first genocide trial (in which, declaring an interest, I testified for the prosecution) died in custody of a massive heart attack. The tribunal established during the maelstrom of the Bosnian war in 1994 was at first dismissed as an unarmed hunter unlikely to bag any big game. Carla del Ponte is currently chief prosecutor for two historic institutions that have become metaphors for our era - whether they stand or fall: the international tribunals on war crimes established at The Hague - trying those accused of crimes committed in former Yugoslavia - and at Arusha, trying defendants from the Rwandan genocide. ![]()
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