By Otto Spijkers
On the ICTY’s website, the indictment is summarized as follows:
Florence Hartmann was indicted for knowingly and willingly interfering with the administration of justice by disclosing information in violation of an order of the Appeals Chamber dated 20 September 2005 and an order of the Appeals Chamber dated 6 April 2006 through means of authoring for publication a book entitled Paix et Châtiment, published by Flammarion on 10 September 2007, and by authoring for publication an article entitled Vital Genocide Documents Concealed, published by the Bosnian Institute on 21 January 2008.
This summary does not mention that Florence Hartmann was the spokesperson for the Prosecutor of the ICTY from 2000 to 2006, but that is no secret.
What kind of information was disclosed?
In 2007, the International Court of Justice ruled that, on the basis of the materials before it, it was not established that the Bosnian Serb army and paramilitaries had committed the genocide in Srebrenica on the instructions, or under the direction of the Government of Serbia, nor that the Serbian leadership exercised effective control over the operations in the course of which the genocide was committed. And thus Serbia could not be held responsible for committing genocide.
Hartmann believed that if the ICJ had before it some of the evidence that was made available to the judges of the ICTY in the Milosevic Case, that the ICJ could have reached a different decision. This is what Hartmann wrote in her article Vital Genocide Documents Concealed:
If the ICJ had possessed evidence that Serbia was ‘in control’ of the Republika Srpska authorities or of the Bosnia Serbian Army, the Court would have not cleared Serbia of genocide at Srebrenica. Many believe that the transcripts or minutes of meetings of Serbia’s Supreme Defence Council (SDC) – the body in charge of the nation’s overall strategic goals and of the Yugoslav army – contain such evidence. Those same minutes were submitted as evidence in the Milosevic case before the ICTY. Judges in the Milosevic case had those minutes at their disposal when they ruled on 16 June 2004 that they ‘could be satisfied beyond reasonable doubt that the accused [i.e. Slobodan Miloševiæ, President of Serbia] was a participant in the joint criminal enterprise (which had) the aim and intention to destroy a part of the Bosnian Muslims as a group’, not only in Srebrenica but also ‘in Brcko, Prijedor, Sanski Most, Bijeljina, Kljuc and Bosanski Novi.’
Indictment for Contempt of the Tribunal
Hartmann was not allowed to cite this ruling, and a number of related rulings; but she did. According to the ICTY’s Rules of Procedure and Evidence,
the Tribunal in the exercise of its inherent power may hold in contempt those who knowingly and wilfully interfere with its administration of justice, including any person who […] discloses information relating to those proceedings in knowing violation of an order of a Chamber.
On 27 August 2008, the Trial Chamber of the ICTY ordered the prosecution of Hartmann on this basis. Yesterday morning she made her first appearance before the judges of the ICTY. I was not present myself, but I understand from this New York Times article that she did not enter a plea of ‘guilty’ or ‘not guilty’, and that she defended herself by arguing that her writing was ‘in the public interest and a matter of freedom of speech.’ The case will start in January 2009.