The Swiss lawyer and politician Dick Marty, who has died aged 78 from pancreatic cancer, played a key role in the human rights work of the parliamentary assembly of the Council of Europe. As its rapporteur, he uncovered how European countries had colluded in a “global spider’s web” of illegal US detentions and human rights abuses, secret jails and flight transfers of terrorist suspects stretching from Asia to Guantánamo Bay.
The existence of a network of secret prisons was identified in his reports in 2006 and 2007 to the Council of Europe (the 46-member organisation set up in 1949 to uphold the rule of law in Europe), and was later acknowledged by the US authorities. The European court of human rights subsequently found that several states, including Italy, Lithuania, North Macedonia, Poland and Romania, had been complicit in the CIA secret detainee programme and thus had violated the European human rights convention.
Since 1998, Marty had been a member of the parliamentary assembly of the Strasbourg-based Council of Europe, the deliberative body composed of national parliamentarians that elects judges to the European court of human rights. He carried out his investigations at the request of the assembly’s committee on legal affairs and human rights.
Marty was also tasked with looking into whether certain UN security council decisions contravened the standards guaranteed by the European convention on human rights. He came to the view that UNSC blacklists, important and effective tools in combating international terrorism, had major flaws – people could be kept on such blacklists for more than 10 years, even when prosecuting authorities did not possess a shred of evidence against them.
His opinions were endorsed by the assembly, as well as by the findings of the Strasbourg court in the case of Nada v Switzerland in 2013, which found that there was no effective means of obtaining the removal of the applicant’s name from a UNSC blacklist.
This led to the Swiss parliament’s decision to propose that the country’s authorities not apply security council sanctions if, after a three-year period, a blacklisted individual had not been given the opportunity to have his or her case heard before a judicial or independent authority. This bold move was initiated by Marty – also a member of the Swiss parliament – even though article 103 of the UN charter specifies that in the event of a conflict between charter obligations and other international agreements, the charter obligations must prevail.
In 2010, commissioned by Strasbourg, Marty investigated alleged inhumane treatment and the killing of prisoners for the removal and illicit trafficking of human organs by the Kosovo Liberation Army (KLA) during and after the 1998-99 war, involving Hashim Thaçi, the army’s political leader, who became prime minister of Kosovo in 2008. The EU’s Special Investigative Task Force, created as a follow-up to this report, found sufficient evidence to sanction some individuals and led to the setting-up in 2016 of a specialist court at the Hague – the Kosovo Specialist Chambers – where Thaçi and former KLA officials are now being tried for war crimes and crimes against humanity.
In 2010, Marty so impressively demonstrated the existence of grave human rights violations committed by Ramzan Kadyrov’s regime in Chechnya that his report was unanimously adopted by the parliamentary assembly of the Council of Europe, which at the time included Russian parliamentarians.
Born in Sorengo, in the canton of Ticino in southern Switzerland, to Jean Marty, a maître d’hôtel, and his wife, Lydia, Dick went to school in the nearby city of Lugano and then to the University of Neuchâtel, where he gained a doctorate in law. From 1972 until 1975 he worked in Freiburg, Germany, at the Max Planck Institute for Foreign and International Criminal Law (now renamed the Max Planck Institute for the Study of Crime, Security and Law), where he carried out research into Swiss law. In 1975 he was nominated as public prosecutor for Ticino and made a name for himself as a champion in the fight against organised crime.
Between 1995 and 2011, he served as a member of the Swiss Council of States (the upper house of the Swiss parliament) for Ticino, though he continued to work part-time as a legal and economic consultant. In 1998 he became a member of the Swiss national delegation to the parliamentary assembly of the Council of Europe, joining the Alliance of Liberals and Democrats for Europe (ALDE) political group.
In 2020, on the basis of information obtained by the Swiss intelligence services indicating that there was a plot to assassinate him, Marty and his wife, Gabriela, were placed under police protection. He indicated that the threats came from Serbian intelligence services, which wanted to kill him and blame it on Kosovo Albanians. In 2023, in response to this, he published Verità Irriverenti: Riflessioni di un Magistrato Sotto Scorta (Irreverent Truths: Reflections of a Magistrate Under Escort), his reflections on what he called “the degradation of democracies throughout the western world, and on our failure to react”.
In 2023, the secretary general of the Council of Europe awarded Marty the organisation’s Pro Merito medal.
He married Gabriela Tattamani in 1969. She survives him, along with their three daughters, Francesca, Paola and Giulia, and eight grandchildren.
