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'They are kidnapping international justice' - French journalist

French journalist Florence Hartmann was outside a UN tribunal on 24 March, waiting to learn the fate of Bosnian Serb leader Radovan Karadzic, when she was arrested for once revealing how the tribunal hid evidence of war crimes in the Balkans.

French journalist Florence Hartmann in Paris after her release
French journalist Florence Hartmann in Paris after her release Mike Woods/RFI
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“I’ve been following Karadzic from the beginning,” says Florence Hartmann, who crossed paths with the former leader while covering 1990s conflicts in the Balkans for French newspaper Le Monde and then as an employee of the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia (ICTY), serving as spokesperson for chief prosecutor Carla Del Ponte from 2000 to 2006. “So I couldn’t miss this historic day.”

Interview with Florence Hartmann

“I assessed there was no risk, because I had already been in the Netherlands several times since I had this arrest warrant,” says Hartmann of her conviction for revealing how the ICTY blocked documents linking the Serbian state to war crimes during the Balkans conflicts of the 1990s.

But UN guards approached Hartmann, and although victims of the conflict in Bosnia tried to protect her – “they surrounded me, like in rugby, a compact group of people” – the guards forced Hartmann away from the group and into the Tribunal.

“It was brutal for the victims to see someone who had always helped and supported them be arrested by those who would not arrest Karadzic before,” she says in reference to the many years the former Bosnian Serb leader lived in Belgrade between his ICTY indictment in 1995 and arrest in 2008. “They should have abused their power to arrest Karadzic, not a journalist.”

‘A very suspicious and immoral deal’

Following her departure from the ICTY, Hartmann published a book, Paix et Chatiment (Peace and Punishment), as well as an article with the UK-based Bosnian Institute, that revealed ICTY judges twice ruled to block records of wartime defence meetings presided by Serbian President Slobodan Milosevic from being used as evidence in Bosnia’s suit against Serbia in the neighbouring International Court of Justice.

“A country can ask the judges for special protective measures of documents on the basis of national security interest,” Hartmann explains. “I just revealed the national security interest didn’t exist. Serbia was asking to protect the documents in order not to pay millions to the victims, because they believed they would lose on the basis of these documents. And the judges accepted not to apply the law and not to reject the request from Serbia.”

Hartmann acknowledges the rulings were confidential, but argues they came because of “a very suspicious and immoral deal” that violated the UN Security Council resolution that established the court by putting the interests of a state before those of the war’s victims.

The ICTY, however, ruled in 2009 that Hartmann had “knowingly and wilfully interfered with the administration of justice, and thereby committed the crime of contempt of the Tribunal” and handed her a 7000-euro fine.

The tribunal upheld the ruling and, in 2011, claiming it had not received any payment (Hartmann maintains she gave the ICTY instructions on how to collect it from a French bank account), converted the fine into a seven-day sentence to be served in the same UN detention unit holding suspected and convicted war criminals in The Hague.

‘The UN is above the law’

While serving her sentence, Hartmann was kept away from other detainees on the basis of gender segregation, which she considers a pretext to keep her in isolation.

“It’s vindictive. It’s when people have power and nothing to limit their power,” Hartmann says of the ICTY’s moves to carry out her arrest and detention nine years after her revelations. “I was much harder and unpleasant in the rest of this book than in this part. Some parts drove them crazy.”

Over the Easter long weekend, international media bubbled with reports of Hartmann’s detention at the hands of the tribunal for which she once worked, in the same facility of the suspected and convicted war criminals she had sought to bring to justice.

They got panicked because of one article in the New York Times, and that’s why they released me 24 hours early.”

With the sentence served, Hartmann hopes to challenge the ICTY’s actions through the UN’s committee for arbitrary detention, as well as through courts in the Netherlands, France, and possibly the European Court of Human Rights.

“They’re kidnapping not only me to put me in a jail, they are kidnapping international justice, and that’s the worst thing,” she says. “I can prove they have respected none of the international standards or the rules of the UN.”

She also hopes to have her reasons for breaking confidentiality validated by a court, even if doing so comes with the unseemly futile task of taking on the UN structure itself.

“The UN is above the law,” she says. “And above the European Court of Human Rights and other courts of that status. I just hope no one else has to go to jail.”

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