09/16/2009

Fine for former spokesperson of Carla del Ponte, Florence Hartmann, is an "unbearable offence to the Srebrenica survivors”

Bosnia:


The Society for Threatened Peoples (GfbV) has termed the sentence of the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia (ICTY) at The Hague against the former spokesperson of the former Chief Prosecutor Carla del Ponte, Florence Hartmann, as an "unbearable offence also to the survivors of the massacre of Srebrenica”. It is a scandal to punish the woman who for years as Balkan correspondent of the French newspaper Le Monde felt herself committed to the truth and did not want to keep silent on evidence for the responsibility of the Serb government for the genocide, which the Tribunal wanted to keep secret”, said the GfbV chairperson, Tilman Zülch, on Monday in Göttingen. "The Tribunal is dutybound to grant the survivors of the genocide and their lawyers access to the files. Should they fail to do so, the judges would lay themselves open to the charge of having helped those responsible for the crimes against humanity in Bosnia and Herzegovina to get away unpunished.”

 

Florence Hartmann was fined 7,000 euros on Monday by the Tribunal on the grounds that she had published confidential information.

 

The GfbV chair, Tilman Zülch, is also available at politik@gfbv.de