The truth goes to jail

This note, which appeared in my inbox this morning from Belgrade with 104 civil society signatures, goes a long way to explaining why the former spokesperson for the Hague Tribunal is spending a week in prison. Note that it supports her without suggesting that the punishment is contrary to the law. I imagine she will wear the imprisonment as a badge of honor.

The former spokeswoman of the International Criminal Tribunal for former Yugoslavia (ICTY), Florence Hartmann, was arrested on Thursday, 24 March, outside the ICTY building and taken to serve a seven-day jail term. Hartmann was arrested by ICTY security officers on orders of the chamber that rendered a final judgment against her. Civil society representatives from the region of the former Yugoslavia hereby voice their support for Florence Hartmann and her uncompromising struggle for truth.

Florence Hartmann was not given the jail sentence because she did something that is usually considered to constitute contempt of court, such as tampering with witnesses or refusal to give evidence before the international court, but because of exposing and countering the practice of concealing documents in order to protect the interests of some states. Namely, in her book “Paix et Châtiment” [Peace and Punishment] and the article entitled “Vital Genocide Documents Concealed’, published in January 2008, Hartmann revealed information relating to the decision of the ICTY Appeals Chamber ordering that the documents created by the Supreme Defence Council which Serbia supplied to the Tribunal during the trial of  Slobodan  Milošević be filed as confidential.

Let us quote the statement that Hartmann has recently given to the N1 TV Station during the Pressing talk show: “I discovered a decision in which judges say ‘we are concealing very important archives of the Milosevic regime because should Bosnia seek reparation, Serbia would have to pay millions of dollars, which would affect Serbia’s economy (…) This is the only part I used. The judges later removed the classification from these documents themselves, because I had said that was an unlawful thing to do. They disgraced themselves by accusing me, by issuing an arrest warrant for me. What matters is that we now have access to these documents“.

We are profoundly convinced that what Florence Hartmann did may be contrary to the ICTY Statute but is certainly not contrary to justice. Quite the opposite. Therefore we stand by her in her commitment to the pursuit of truth and efforts to make official state archives available to the public.

Lastly, we would like to draw attention to the fact that the Hague Tribunal made a decision to arrest Florence Hartmann at the moment when it showed weakness with respect to Vojislav Šešelj’s decision not to appear before the court for the pronouncement of the judgment against him and Serbia’s refusal to hand over Šešelj and another three members of the Serbian Radical Party accused of contempt of court for tampering with witnesses, to the ICTY. The Hague Tribunal used to apply the same standards to all accused persons in the past, so it should do so in this case too.