Florence Hartmann

Florence Hartmann (born 17 February 1963) 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 (Milosevic, the opposite of crazy), 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 (ICTY) in The Hague.

On 19 July 2011, the Appeals Chamber of the ICTY upheld the first instance decision to convict Hartmann of contempt of court for the section of text called "Vital genocide documents concealed" in her book, Paix et Châtiment, les guerres secrètes de la politique et de la justice internationales, which included 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 (£6,100). 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. In March 2016, Hartmann was arrested while reporting at the tribunal building, and forced to serve out her sentence.