Carla Del Ponte is a Swiss lawyer and diplomat. She was the Swiss Federal Prosecutor from 1994 to 1998. She then served as Chief Prosecutor of the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia in The Hague from 1999 to 2007 and, concurrently, as Chief Prosecutor of the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda in Arusha from 1999 to 2003. From 2008 to 2011, she was Swiss Ambassador to Argentina.

From 2011 to 2017, she was a member of a commission (IICISyria) set up by the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights to investigate human rights violations in Syria during the civil war there.

Carla Del Ponte was born in Lugano in 1947. Three years after studying law in Bern, Geneva and the United Kingdom, she opened her own law and notary office. In 1981, she became an investigating judge and four years later a public prosecutor. In 1989, Del Ponte, who was working with the Italian judge Giovanni Falcone, who was later murdered, against the Mafia, narrowly escaped an explosive attack at his home in Palermo. In 1994, she was appointed Switzerland's chief prosecutor, and in 1999 she was appointed to The Hague.

Del Ponte was awarded the Westphalian Peace Prize for her ‘courageous work’.
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