Trial for ex-spokeswoman, journalist opens at Yugoslav war crimes court

Florence Hartmann charged with ‘deliberately publishing’ confidential information

Demonstrators hold a banner in front of the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia (ICTY) building yesterday in The Hague in support of Florence Hartmann, an ex-spokeswoman of the UN’s Yugoslav war crimes court, who went on trial before her former employer.

THE HAGUE (AFP) – Florence Hartmann, a former spokeswoman of the UN’s Yugoslav war crimes court, went on trial before her ex-employer yesterday for publishing classified facts her lawyers claim were already in the public domain.

The 46-year-old journalist is charged with two counts of contempt for writing about two confidential appeals chamber decisions in a 2007 book on the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia (ICTY) and in a later published article.

The information, which emerged in the course of the trial of late Serbian strongman Slobodan Milosevic, allegedly implicates the Serbian state in the 1995 massacre of some 8,000 Muslim men and boys in Srebrenica, Bosnia-Herzegovina.

Hartmann, a French national, faces up to seven years in jail and a fine of up to 100,000 euros ($139,000) if convicted.

Prosecutor Bruce MacFarlane told judges yesterday the trial had nothing to do with whether Hartmann was a journalist or a former employee and everything with the fact that she “deliberately published” classified information. But Hartmann’s lawyer Karim Khan said the judges themselves had made the decisions public by referring to them in later judgments made in open court. There could, therefore, have been no confidentiality breach.

Hartmann covered the Balkan wars of the 1990s as a journalist for the French newspaper Le Monde and went on to become spokeswoman for former ICTY chief prosecutor Carla Del Ponte from 2000 to 2006.

After leaving the court, she published the book “Peace and Punishment: The Secret Wars of Politics and International Justice” and wrote several articles on the court’s work, notably for Paris Match magazine.

Khan said that six months before the book’s release, The New York Times and the International Herald Tribune had published articles citing the same facts, without any reaction from the tribunal.

About two dozen Hartmann supporters from the northern French city of Lille protested outside the court in The Hague in the morning, waving a banner reading: “Sentences for war criminals, not journalists.”

A support committee had sent ICTY president Patrick Robinson a petition containing more than 3,500 signatures of people demanding Hartmann’s acquittal.

“Florence Hartmann was only doing her job as a journalist,” Nanou Rousseau, president of the lobby group Mothers for Peace, which supports the journalist, told AFP. “This trial should not be happening. It is an insult to the history and the victims who are denied the right to know the truth.”

More than a dozen people have been prosecuted for contempt of the ICTY, mostly accused of witness intimidation. Four journalists have been fined, including one who was also jailed for a period of three months.