Jean-François Thony is the President of the Siracusa International Institute for Criminal Justice and Human Rights and a former Prosecutor General in France.

He began his career in the French Judiciary as Examining Judge (juge d’instruction), Deputy Prosecutor (substitut du procureur), and Chief Prosecutor (procureur de la République).  He joined the United Nations International Drug Control Programme in early 1991 as Senior Legal Adviser and later became Programme Manager of the UN Global Program against Money Laundering. In July 2000, he was appointed as Judge, Court of Appeal of Versailles (France).

He joined the Legal Department of the International Monetary Fund (IMF) in July 2002 to serve as Assistant General Counsel and Head of the Financial Integrity Group, with the responsibility of overseeing and coordinating all anti-money laundering and combating the financing of terrorism (AML/CFT) activities of the IMF. He was appointed in September 2007 as Director of the French “Ecole Nationale de la Magistrature” (National School for the Judiciary), where he served for more than four years. In February 2012, he was appointed as Prosecutor General of the Court of Appeal of Alsace, in Colmar (France) and in 2018, Prosecutor General of the Court of Bretagne in Rennes. He also serves as a consultant for the International Monetary Fund and the European Union AML/CFT Global Facility.