In March, French journalist Florence Hartmann was jailed at the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia (ICTY) in The Hague for contempt of court. Hartmann was seized by United Nations security while waiting for the verdict on Radovan Karadžić, nicknamed the Butcher of Bosnia, outside the The Hague court in the Netherlands on March 24 this year.
The journalist is a former spokesperson for the ICTY. She worked with the Tribunal’s former Prosecutor, Carla Del Ponte, between 2000 and 2006. Hartmann was accused of revealing that the tribunal had withheld documents on the Srebrenica massacre from its sister organisation, the International Court of Justice (ICJ).
Hartmann was arrested over a 2009 conviction for contempt for disclosing confidential court decisions in her 2007 book Paix et Châtiment and a 2008 article. She was summoned to appear in court on 15 September 2008, but no arrest occurred at this stage.
The appeals judges upheld the guilty verdict and a 7,000-euro fine in July. But this sentence was upgraded to seven days’ imprisonment in 2011 when the fine remained unpaid.
She talks about her experience sharing a prison with ‘some of the world’s bloodthirsty executioners’. Read her story here.
