UN War Crimes Tribunal Prosecutes Its Spokeswoman

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The United Nations War Crimes Tribunal headquartered in The Hague has begun the trial of its former spokeswoman Florence Hartmann over confidential information which she published in her 2007 book entitled Peace & Punishment. Subsequently, the Bosnian Institute published the information on the Internet. See: http://www.bosnia.org.uk/news/news_body.cfm?newsid=2341

The sensitive information published by Ms. Hartmann, who is a journalist, included confidential orders made by the court in the Slobodan Milosevic trial not to publicise documents that allegedly implicated the Serbian state in the Srebrenica massacre of 1995, in which some 8,000 Muslim men and boys were killed.

The documents were provided by the Serbian government to The Hague on the condition that they were only to be used confidentially in the Milosevic trial and could not be publicly released under any circumstance on the premise that the documents would compromise Serbia's national security. The War Crimes Tribunal agreed to this limitation in order to obtain the documents which the prosecution relied on, in part, for its prosecution of Milosevic.

Critics have called the case against Ms. Hartmann an attack on free speech but the Court's backers say it will help uphold the credibility of the court and that by publishing the documents Ms. Hartmann jeopardised future trials on the theory that no documents would be provided by any third-party which could be construed against that entities best interest.

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