The journalist Florence Hartmann, a former correspondent for Le Monde, has been jailed at the war crimes tribunal in the Hague, the body established to try the criminals she devoted her life to exposing, reports The Guardian.
Hartmann’s lawyer said she was being held in isolation, under 24-hour flourescent light, a situation that will last until at least Tuesday because of the Easter holiday.
Hartmann was convicted for contempt of court in 2009 for revealing in a book that the tribunal had withheld crucial information on the Srebrenica massacre of 1995 from the nearby international criminal court. The conviction was later upheld on appeal.
She was originally fined €7,000 (£5,532), but that sentence was later converted to seven days in jail after the tribunal claimed the fine had not been paid. In December 2011, France refused a request to extradite her.
Hartmann was approached by United Nations police on a grassy area outside the tribunal on Thursday, where Bosnian survivors and victims’ families had gathered to wait for the verdict on the former Bosnian Serb leader Radovan Karadžić. The demonstrators attempted to close ranks around her to prevent her being detained, but later police managed to separate her, bring her into the tribunal building and drag her through the lobby as she shouted protests against her treatment.
After working for Le Monde in Bosnia, Hartmann served at the tribunal as spokeswoman for and advisor to its prosecutor’s office. In her 2007 book, Paix et châtiment (Peace and Punishment), Hartmann revealed that documents, which proved Serbian complicity in the Srebrenica massacre, had been sealed by the tribunal.
Hatmann, who did not reveal the contents of the documents, insisted that those who survived or were bereaved by the massacre had the right to know of the tribunal’s decision to keep them secret. Her lawyer, Guénaël Mettraux, described her situation as a disgrace on Friday.