ROTTERDAM, The Netherlands
Carla del Ponte, the Chief Prosecutor at the International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia in The Hague will be giving the 11th Mandeville lecture entitled “Virtues and Vices versus Legality: The Thorny Road to International Justice” at the Erasmus University Rotterdam.
Del Ponte is the chief prosecutor at the Yugoslav Tribunal against former president Slobodan Milosevic. She will be receiving the Mandeville medal and a certificate in recognition of her unceasing efforts to bring to trial the leaders of the former Yugoslavia who are suspected of crimes against humanity. She is, moreover, contributing to the development and application of international (criminal) law.
The feisty lawyer has been nicknamed “the Gestapo” by the Serbian press and “an unguided missile” by Swiss banking executives when she campaigned to end banking secrecy in Switzerland that protected international criminals.
In the course of her prolific career, she has implicated former Russian leader Boris Yeltsin in mafia links, frozen the bank accounts of former Pakistani Prime Minister Benazir Bhutto and taken on the Columbian drug cartels. She also proposed to investigate the Tutsi-led Rwandan Patriotic Army which was responsible for killing more than 30,000 Hutus.
In 1999 the UN Security Council approved her appointment as Chief Prosecutor at the International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia in The Hague. In addition, she has done research into possible violations of international human rights law by NATO during the Kosovo campaign in 1999.
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