The Swiss lawyer and politician Dick Marty, who has died aged 78 from pancreatic most cancers, performed a key function within the human rights work of the parliamentary meeting of the Council of Europe. As its rapporteur, he uncovered how European nations had colluded in a “international spider’s net” of unlawful US detentions and human rights abuses, secret jails and flight transfers of terrorist suspects stretching from Asia to Guantánamo Bay.
The existence of a community of secret prisons was recognized in his reviews in 2006 and 2007 to the Council of Europe (the 46-member organisation arrange in 1949 to uphold the rule of legislation in Europe), and was later acknowledged by the US authorities. The European courtroom of human rights subsequently discovered that a number of states, together with Italy, Lithuania, North Macedonia, Poland and Romania, had been complicit within the CIA secret detainee programme and thus had violated the European human rights conference.
Since 1998, Marty had been a member of the parliamentary meeting of the Strasbourg-based Council of Europe, the deliberative physique composed of nationwide parliamentarians that elects judges to the European courtroom of human rights. He carried out his investigations on the request of the meeting’s committee on authorized affairs and human rights.
Marty was additionally tasked with wanting into whether or not sure UN safety council selections contravened the requirements assured by the European conference on human rights. He got here to the view that UNSC blacklists, essential and efficient instruments in combating worldwide terrorism, had main flaws – individuals could possibly be saved on such blacklists for greater than 10 years, even when prosecuting authorities didn’t possess a shred of proof towards them.
His opinions have been endorsed by the meeting, in addition to by the findings of the Strasbourg courtroom within the case of Nada v Switzerland in 2013, which discovered that there was no efficient technique of acquiring the removing of the applicant’s title from a UNSC blacklist.
This led to the Swiss parliament’s choice to suggest that the nation’s authorities not apply safety council sanctions if, after a three-year interval, a blacklisted particular person had not been given the chance to have his or her case heard earlier than a judicial or unbiased authority. This daring transfer was initiated by Marty – additionally a member of the Swiss parliament – despite the fact that article 103 of the UN constitution specifies that within the occasion of a battle between constitution obligations and different worldwide agreements, the constitution obligations should prevail.
In 2010, commissioned by Strasbourg, Marty investigated alleged inhumane remedy and the killing of prisoners for the removing and illicit trafficking of human organs by the Kosovo Liberation Military (KLA) throughout and after the 1998-99 battle, involving Hashim Thaçi, the military’s political chief, who turned prime minister of Kosovo in 2008. The EU’s Particular Investigative Job Power, created as a follow-up to this report, discovered adequate proof to sanction some people and led to the setting-up in 2016 of a specialist courtroom on the Hague – the Kosovo Specialist Chambers – the place Thaçi and former KLA officers at the moment are being tried for battle crimes and crimes towards humanity.
In 2010, Marty so impressively demonstrated the existence of grave human rights violations dedicated by Ramzan Kadyrov’s regime in Chechnya that his report was unanimously adopted by the parliamentary meeting of the Council of Europe, which on the time included Russian parliamentarians.
Born in Sorengo, within the canton of Ticino in southern Switzerland, to Jean Marty, a maître d’hôtel, and his spouse, Lydia, Dick went to highschool within the close by metropolis of Lugano after which to the College of Neuchâtel, the place he gained a doctorate in legislation. From 1972 till 1975 he labored in Freiburg, Germany, on the Max Planck Institute for International and Worldwide Felony Regulation (now renamed the Max Planck Institute for the Examine of Crime, Safety and Regulation), the place he carried out analysis into Swiss legislation. In 1975 he was nominated as public prosecutor for Ticino and made a reputation for himself as a champion within the battle towards organised crime.
Between 1995 and 2011, he served as a member of the Swiss Council of States (the higher home of the Swiss parliament) for Ticino, although he continued to work part-time as a authorized and financial guide. In 1998 he turned a member of the Swiss nationwide delegation to the parliamentary meeting of the Council of Europe, becoming a member of the Alliance of Liberals and Democrats for Europe (ALDE) political group.
In 2020, on the premise of data obtained by the Swiss intelligence providers indicating that there was a plot to assassinate him, Marty and his spouse, Gabriela, have been positioned beneath police safety. He indicated that the threats got here from Serbian intelligence providers, which needed to kill him and blame it on Kosovo Albanians. In 2023, in response to this, he printed Verità Irriverenti: Riflessioni di un Magistrato Sotto Scorta (Irreverent Truths: Reflections of a Justice of the Peace Beneath Escort), his reflections on what he known as “the degradation of democracies all through the western world, and on our failure to react”.
In 2023, the secretary common of the Council of Europe awarded Marty the organisation’s Professional Merito medal.
He married Gabriela Tattamani in 1969. She survives him, together with their three daughters, Francesca, Paola and Giulia, and eight grandchildren.
