Hague Tribunal To Free Journalist Florence Hartmann
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The president of the Hague-based Mechanism for International Tribunals, Theodor Meron, said on Tuesday that Hartmann will be released after serving two-thirds of her seven-day sentence.
“In determining that Hartmann should be granted early release, the president considered that her exemplary conduct in the United Nations Detention Unit and her completion of more than two-thirds of her sentence militated in favour of her release,” the Mechanism for International Tribunals said.
Hartmann was arrested last Thursday outside the International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia in The Hague before Radovan Karadzic’s war crimes verdict.
She had been convicted of contempt by the UN war crimes court in 2011 after she used some of its documents in her book Paix et Chatiment (Peace and Punishment) and in an article, disclosing the details of a decision by the court to withhold documents related to Serbiaʼs involvement in the Srebrenica massacres in 1995.
She was originally fined 7,000 euros, but the sentence was converted to seven days in jail after the court claimed the fine had not been paid. In December 2011, France refused a request to extradite her.
In his decision granting early release, Meron also rejected a complaint that submitted by Hartmann’s lawyers about the conditions of her detention at the UN Detention Unit, where they said she was being held in solitary confinement.
Around 100 human rights activists and journalists from across the Balkans published an open letter expressing support for Hartmann on Monday, arguing that she should not be punished for trying to expose the truth.
Hartmann is a former Balkans correspondent for the French newspaper Le Monde. In 2000 she went to work for the tribunal as spokesperson for the chief prosecutor, remaining there until 2006.
