Swiss prosecutor and ‘mafia hunter’ Dick Marty dies aged 78

Dick Marty in 2014 Keystone / Lukas Lehmann

Former Swiss senator and prosecutor Dick Marty died on Thursday aged 78, his party confirmed.

Marty’s death leaves an unbridgeable gap in the political and social landscape of Ticino, the Ticino Radical-Liberal Party said. Marty was a personality of the highest calibre who had earned respect and esteem at national and international level over the years, it added.

“He worked tirelessly for an open Switzerland, human dignity and the rule of law,” tweeted Interior Minister Alain Berset, who holds the rotating Swiss presidency this year. Former party colleagues also expressed their sadness and paid tribute. “Marty was a reference for his integrity, rigour and morals,” tweeted parliamentarian Damien Cottier.

Marty was born in the southern Italian-speaking canton of Ticino, where he served as deputy public prosecutor, then public prosecutor from 1975-1989. He was a member of the Ticino cantonal government from 1989 to 1995.

Elected to the Swiss Senate in 1995, he was a member of the centre-right Radical Party. He stepped down in 2011. Among his initiatives were installing an independent federal prosecutor and the decriminalisation of abortion.

He was elected to the Council of Europe parliamentary assembly in 1999 and chaired the Committee on Legal Affairs and Human Rights from 2005 to 2008. He retired in 2011.

On behalf of the committee, he investigated the CIA’s secret prisons in Europe, publishing a report in 2006 that said 14 countries had colluded with the US in a “spider’s web” of human rights abuses. Marty said other countries, including Switzerland, had been involved actively or passively in the detention or transfer of unknown persons.

In 2010 he published a report on suspected organ trafficking in Kosovo, which implicated high-ranking members of the Kosovo Liberation Army (KLA). The latter investigation was apparently the catalyst for an alleged assassination order against Marty from Serbia, which has never accepted the formation of an independent Kosovo.

How we work

This news story has been written and carefully fact-checked by an external editorial team. At SWI swissinfo.ch we select the most relevant news for an international audience and use automatic translation tools such as DeepL to translate it into English. Providing you with automatically translated news gives us the time to write more in-depth articles. You can find them here. 

If you want to know more about how we work, have a look here, and if you have feedback on this news story please write to [e-mail].