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.
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Ex-Swiss prosecutor Dick Marty on politics, truth and his ‘last battle’
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In his new book, former Swiss senator and prosecutor Dick Marty looks back at the economic and political crises that have hit Switzerland.
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.
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Former Swiss prosecutor ‘targeted by Serbian assassins’
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Ex-Swiss prosecutor Dick Marty has been under armed guard for two years following death threats he believes originate from Serbia.
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