Former Council of Europe rapporteur for Kosovo Dick Marty dies

Photo: FREDERICK FLORIN / AFP / Profimedia

Dick Marty, the former rapporteur of the Council of Europe on KLA crimes, has died at the age of 79.

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Marty is the author of a report from 2010 based on which the Kosovo Specialized Chambers ("special KLA court") and Prosecution have been establishe in The Hague, where wartime leaders of the KLA ("Kosovo Liberation Army") - Hashim Thaci, Kadri Veseli, Rexhep Selimi and Jakup Krasniqi are currently on trial.

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

Marty was elected to the Swiss Senate in 1995, as a member of the center-right Radical Party. He resigned in 2011.

Among his initiatives were the establishment of an independent federal prosecutor and decriminalization of abortion.

He was elected to the Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe (CoE) in 1999 and chaired the Committee for Legal Affairs and Human Rights from 2005 to 2008. He retired in 2011.

On behalf of the committee, he investigated secret CIA prisons in Europe, releasing a report in 2006 that alleged 14 countries colluded with the US in a "spider web" of human rights abuses.

Marty said other countries, including Switzerland, were actively or passively involved in the detention or transfer of unknown persons.

In 2010, he published a report about suspected organ trafficking in Kosovo (organs harvested from Serb civilians illegally detained by Kosovo Albanians), which involved high-ranking members of the "Kosovo Liberation Army."

(Telegraf.rs)