Madame Prosecutor—Confrontations with Humanity’s Worst Criminals and the Culture of Impunity

The Open Society Institute hosted a conversation with Chuck Sudetic, co-author of Carla Del Ponte’s memoir, Madame Prosecutor: Confrontations with Humanity's Worst Criminals and the Culture of Impunity (Other Press).

Carla Del Ponte won international recognition as Switzerland's attorney general when she pursued cases against the Sicilian mafia. In 1999, she answered the United Nations’ call to become the chief prosecutor of the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia and for Rwanda. In her new role, Del Ponte confronted genocide and crimes against humanity head-on, struggling to bring to justice the highest-ranking individuals responsible for massive acts of violence in Rwanda, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Croatia, and Kosovo.

These tribunals have been unprecedented. They operate along the edge of the divide between national sovereignty and international responsibility, in the gray zone between the judicial and the political, a largely unexplored realm for prosecutors and judges. It is a realm whose native inhabitants—political leaders and diplomats, soldiers and spies—assume that they can commit the big crime without being held culpable. It is a realm crisscrossed by what Del Ponte calls the muro di gomma—“the wall of rubber”—referring to the tactics government officials use to hide their unwillingness to confront the culture of impunity that has allowed persons responsible for acts of unspeakable violence to escape accountability.