Former Hague tribunal spokeswoman Florence Hartmann will receive the judgement in her contempt of court case before the Yugoslavia tribunal on Monday. Carla del Ponte's former assistant is charged with revealing confidential information about the trial of late Serbian leader Slobodan Milosevic.

The French journalist is the first former employee to stand trial for contempt before the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia (ICTY) in The Hague.

Her case is filed under the same number as that of Slobodan Milosevic. But Hartmann refuses to sit on the same chair as the tribunals regular suspects since her case is not about war crimes.

Hartmann has publicly accused the UN war crimes tribunal of "trying to silence the truth". But the tribunal says that Del Ponte's former representative revealed confidential details about the Miloševic trial.

Prison sentence

The French author could face a seven year prison sentence or a 100,000 euro fine if found guilty. The tribunal alleges that Hartmann authored a text published in 2007 and 2008 that disclosed information relating to confidential decisions of the ICTY Appeals Chamber.

The tribunal says that she "knew that the information was confidential at the time disclosure was made, that the decisions from which the information was drawn were ordered to be filed confidentially, and that by her disclosure she was revealing confidential information to the public."

Peace and Punishment

Hartmann covered the 1990s Balkan wars as a correspondent for the French newspaper Le Monde. She thereafter became spokeswoman for the former chief war crimes prosecutor Carla del Ponte from 2000 to 2006. She then published a book, "Peace and Punishment: The Secret Wars of Politics and International Justice". In 2008, Hartmann wrote an article entitled "Vital Genocide Documents Concealed" that was published by the Bosnian Institute.

In her publications Hartmann wrote that the Hague prosecution was allegedly unhappy with the tribunal's decision to accept Serbia's request to have some portions of the state archive documents considered in closed sessions. The judges in the Milosevic case allowed Serbia to censor parts of evidence that was made public. She believes that it was precisely those pieces of evidence that were key in determining Serbia's responsibility for the genocide in Bosnia.

Hartmann argues that it was thanks to the Tribunal's collusion with Serbia in the suppression of this crucial piece of evidence, that Bosnia was not able to draw upon the latter in its case against Serbia for genocide at the International Court of Justice (ICJ), leading to Serbia's acquittal.

Far from punishing the perpetrators of genocide in the former Yugoslavia, the Tribunal has helped to shield them, Hartmann says. She accused judges of the Appeals Chamber, headed by former Tribunal President Fausto Pocar, of being "accomplices in manipulation organized by the authorities in Belgrade, so that the International Court of Justice, which heard the Bosnian genocide lawsuit, would be made to make the same mistakes the Hague Tribunal made".

Her book has received broad coverage, and it kicked off a storm in the Balkans even before translations became available in early November 2007, with local politicians using it to attack the ICTY's legitimacy. A month after the publication, she already received a letter from the tribunal reminding her of her administrative and legal obligations to respect its confidentiality rules.

Also see the research file on the case against Hartmann on the Hague Justice Portal