Madame Prosecutor: Confrontations With Humanity's Worst Criminals and the Culture of Impunity

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"– a metaphor 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, wholesale violence to escape accountability. Madame Prosecutor is Del Ponte's courageous and startling memoir of her eight years spent striving to serve justice.

Carla Del Ponte

Carla Del Ponte was chief prosecutor of the United Nations International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia from 1999 to 2007 and chief prosecutor of the United Nations International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda from 1999 to 2003. Her work contributed to the indictment, arrest, or prosecution of dozens of persons accused of genocide and other war crimes, including Slobodan Milosevic, Theoneste Bagosora, and two of the world’s most-wanted men, Radovan Karadzic and General Ratko Mladic. Del Ponte has received numerous awards and honors. She is currently Switzerland’s ambassador to Argentina.

Chuck Sudetic

Co-author Chuck Sudetic reported for the New York Times from 1990 to 1995 on the breakup of Yugoslavia and the transition from communism in other Balkan countries. He is the author of Blood and Vengeance (1998), and his articles have appeared in The Economist, The Atlantic Monthly, Rolling Stone, and Mother Jones, among others. From 2001 to 2005, he worked as an analyst for the Yugoslavia Tribunal. He is now a senior writer for the Open Society Institute (Soros Foundation) and is completing a book about the Adriatic town of Dubrovnik. He resides in Paris.