Florence Hartmann

Who is Florence Hartmann?

Florence Hartmann is a French journalist and author. During the 1990s she was a correspondent in the Balkans for the French newspaper Le Monde. In 1999 she published her first book, Milosevic, la diagonale du fou, reissued by Gallimard in 2002. From October 2000 until October 2006 she was official spokesperson and Balkan adviser to Carla Del Ponte, chief prosecutor of the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia in The Hague.

On 19 July 2011, the Appeals Chamber of the ICTY upheld the first instance decision to convict Florence Hartmann of contempt of court for disclosing the “legal reasoning” of two confidential appellate rulings of the UN Tribunal approving black-outs and exclusions from critical historical war documents showing Serbia's involvement in the Bosnian war of the 1990s. She was fined €7,000. The fine was later converted into a seven-day prison sentence, for which the ICTY issued an arrest warrant. In December 2011, France refused to extradite her.