In 2003, the U.N. Security Council removed Del Ponte as the Prosecutor for the ICTR, and replaced her there with Hassan Bubacar Jallow following pressure from Rwanda's president Kagame who was obstructing her efforts to investigate crimes by Tutsi.

As public prosecutor, she dealt with cases of money laundering, fraud, drug trafficking, arms smuggling, terrorism and espionage, often looking into the many international links forged in Switzerland's role as a global business centre.

[3] It was during that period that she and Investigative Judge Giovanni Falcone uncovered the link between Swiss money launderers and the Italian drug trade in the so-called "pizza connection."

Del Ponte was more fortunate as half a tonne of explosives planted in the foundations of her Palermo home were discovered in time for her to escape the attempted assassination unhurt.

[13] In 1999, Del Ponte suffered a setback when Switzerland's highest court overturned the confiscation by her office of $90 million from Swiss accounts belonging to Raúl Salinas de Gortari, the brother of a former President of Mexico.

Del Ponte was the first experienced prosecutor to hold the job on the war crimes tribunals; her predecessors, Louise Arbour and Richard Goldstone, were both judges.

[14] In August 2003, after being on the Rwandan genocide case for four years, Del Ponte was removed from the appointment for political reasons [15] and replaced by Hassan Bubacar Jallow.

[18] On January 30, 2007 Del Ponte announced her intention to resign as Chief Prosecutor at the ICTY at the end of the year, stating it was "time to return to normal life.

From September 2012 to August 2017, Del Ponte was a member of the Independent International Commission of Inquiry on the Syrian Arab Republic,[20] under the auspices of the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights.

[citation needed] She stated, "We still have to deepen our investigation, verify and confirm (the findings) through new witness testimony, but according to what we have established so far, it is at the moment opponents of the regime who are using sarin gas.

"[21] The following day, in an apparent reaction to Del Ponte's comments, the Commission issued a press release clarifying that it "has not reached conclusive findings as to the use of chemical weapons in Syria by any parties in the conflict".

The report also indicated, based on "evidence available concerning the nature, quality and quantity of the agents used" that the perpetrators of the Al-Ghouta attack "likely had access to the chemical weapons stockpile of the Syrian military".

[27] Del Ponte told Syria's ambassador that she had been right to quickly reach the conclusion that Assad's government used chemical weapons during an attack on the town of Khan Sheikhoun in April 2017.

[25] In late December 1999, in an interview with The Observer in London, Del Ponte was asked if she was prepared to press criminal charges against NATO personnel in Kosovo for alleged war crimes committed by pilots and their commanders.

These abducted individuals - an unknown number – were allegedly transferred to a yellow house in or around the Albanian town of Burrel, where doctors extracted the captives' internal organs.

But other captives were women from Kosovo, Albania, Russia, and other Slavic countries.In 2008, the Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe authorized an investigation and employed Dick Marty to report the findings to the Parliament.

According to a draft Council of Europe report cited by The Daily Telegraph, Prime Minister Hashim Thaci was one of the key players in the traffic of organs of Serb prisoners after the 1998–99 conflict.