17 Sep ICTY Former Official Convicted
The Crimes of War site has noted that Florence Hartmann has been convicted in the ICTY:
The International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia this week convicted a former official of contempt of court for disclosing the contents and effect of two confidential Appeals Chamber decisions. The Court found that Florence Hartmann, a French journalist and former spokesperson for the Prosecutor, had knowingly revealed in a book and an article that documents potentially implicating Serbia for the Bosnian genocide were granted protective measures so as to shield Serbia from responsibility before the International Court of Justice.
I’m sure KJH and others who follow the tribunal decisions carefully will have more to say, but I will say from my more outside vantage point that it all seems very strange to me. Plus I will add one comment by an American official (current), okay to quote but not for attribution … “Don’t these people have better ways to spend their time and resources?” I don’t regard myself as expert enough in the case to reach a definitive conclusion myself, but instead as perhaps indicative of a certain skepticism in some official circles. Well, you can read about it at COW’s press release.
They fined Hartmann for shedding light on existing evidence of Serbia’s complicity in genocide while releasing Biljana Plavsic who pleaded guilty to persecutions on political, racial and religious grounds by “inviting paramilitaries from Serbia to assist Bosnian Serb forces in effecting ethnic separation by force”.
Good work guys.
I’ve never understood the problem with this case. She leaked confidential information. Whether that information should have been classified confidential in the first place is irrelevant. She knowingly and willingly broke the rules, and she got an appropriate punishment. Had she been punished more severely, I would have been conerned, but a simple fine seems reasonable.
Ken,
I completely agree with the unnamed US official. Even if we grant that the Tribunal has the inherent authority to punish contempt, pursuing contempt cases — particularly against someone like Seselj, who is already facing very serious charges — is a waste of scarece resources and precious time. (The Completion Strategy’s deleterious impact on the fairness of trials is already bad enough.)
Here is what Bill Schabas has to say:
I was never convinced that the Tribunal should even deal with such cases. After all, its jurisdiction is confined to serious violations of humanitarian law committed on the territory of the former Yugoslavia. Publishing a book in Paris hardly fits within that remit. The judges argue that this is an inherent jurisdiction, one that is necessary to ensure the administration of justice. But they might just as well have agreed with the Dutch authorities that contempt and similar matters be dealt with by national courts, something that was seriously entertained many years ago by the International Law Commission. At present, the Yugoslavia devotes a considerable amount of its resources to prosecution of contempt cases. The money might be better spent.
Yes, the money would be better spent – but this does not have anything to do with FH’s innocence. It is a matter of prosecutorial discretion: it happens everywhere that ‘minor’ crimes are prosecuted taking resources away from the big mafia or terrorism cases, but a choice is made to state clearly that a crime is a crime is a crime. FH could have stated ‘yes, I am guilty, but I did it for a higher cause (as AmeL appears to be saying). What she did (if it was indeed proven BRD, I have not read the judgment) could have serious implications for State cooperation with international tribunals in the future, so she had to be punished to make the point. The same people complaining about her conviction often complain about lack of State cooperation accusing governments not to trust international judicial institutions…what was the ICTY to do in such a situation? Continue having only contempt cases against minor Croat journalists and leave alone the most famous journalist disclosing confidential information? Again, I think the whole story was sad and that the Tribunals should not deal with these cases themselves, but until another machanism is in place there was no choice. The story… Read more »