The Swiss lawyer Carla Del Ponte won a Freedom Award from Freie Universität Berlin. Beginning in 1994, as a federal prosecutor for the Swiss Confederation, Del Ponte fought gainst money laundering, arms trafficking, corruption, and organized crime.

In 1999, upon recommendation by the United Nations Secretary General Kofi Annan, the UN Security Council appointed her Chief Prosecutor of the International Criminal Tribunal for former Yugoslawia (1999-2007) and the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda (1999-2003) in The Hague. During her eight years in office, of the 161 individuals that the war crimes tribunal had indicted since being founded in 1993, 91 had been arrested or voluntarily surrounded to the authorities.

During the award ceremony on October 20, 2014, she called on the international community to become more involved in the Syria conflict. On behalf of the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights, Del Ponte has been investigating crimes in the Syrian civil war since 2011.