Carla Del Ponte

* 09 Feb 1947, Swiss, Jurist & Diplomat

I am on a day-trip to the Netherlands to meet with the ‘Iron Lady of The Hague’. The security measures at the International Criminal Tribunal are impressive. An assistant leads me to the office of Carla Del Ponte, where she is sitting behind a pile of files. “What do you want?” she asks. “Well, I want to photograph your hands”. ”Then let’s do it!” After I took a picture while she holds a report on Slobodan Milosevic, I ask her if I can take her portrait. She sits down and says, “Serious! I have to look serious!” And I say, “Yes, you are such a serious person.” And she laughs. With great heart.

Carla Del Ponte was born in 1947 in Ticino, Switzerland. She studied law and obtained her LL.M. in 1972. In 1981, Del Ponte was appointed an investigating magistrate, and later public prosecutor at the Lugano district attorney's office. As public prosecutor, she dealt with cases of money laundering, fraud, drug trafficking, arms smuggling, terrorism and espionage and became well known in Europe, for instance for breaking a Sicilian Mafia money-laundering operation in Switzerland. Since then, her personal image of the tough, incongruous and non-conformist woman who does not succumb to any kind of pressure was forged. 1999, she was appointed prosecutor for the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia (ICTY) and the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda (ICTR) and was arguably regarded as the most famous Prosecutor ever to attain this position. She resigned from the ICT in 2008 to serve as Switzerland’s Ambassador to Argentina until 2011, when she retired.

Carla Del Ponte was married and has one son.
Source: Wikipedia, Intellectum.org