The ex-spokeswoman for the chief prosecutor of the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia, convicted in 2009 on contempt charges, was dramatically detained by UN security guards at the court on Thursday, AFP reporters witnessed.
French national Florence Hartmann, who was sentenced on appeal to seven days in prison in 2009 after writing a book containing confidential court details, was grabbed at the tribunal's entrance just hours before a landmark verdict against former Bosnian Serb leader Radovan Karadzic.
Two guards in blue shirts grabbed Hartmann by the arms outside the heavily guarded court building in The Hague as she was giving a TV interview. She sought to resist and demonstrators gathered for the Karadzic verdict tried to shield her.
In 2009, Hartmann was initially fined 7,000 euros ($7,800) for contempt for disclosing confidential information in her book "Paix et Chatiment" (Peace and Punishment).
"The accused knowingly and wilfully interfered with the administration of justice, and thereby committed the crime of contempt," judge Bakone Moloto said at the time.
Hartmann, a former Balkans correspondent for French daily Le Monde, was prosecuted for revealing details of two confidential appeals chamber decisions in the 2007 book.
The data, which emerged during the trial of late Serbian strongman Slobodan Milosevic, allegedly implicated the Serbian state in the 1995 massacre of some 8,000 Muslim men and boys in Srebrenica, Bosnia.
In 2011, after Hartmann had not paid the fine, ICTY judges sentenced her to seven days in jail. The court asked French authorities to arrest her, which the French foreign ministry refused to do.
Loudly protesting, Hartmann was Thursday dragged into the court where AFP saw her collapse to the ground, before being hauled to her feet and taken away behind secure doors into the back of the premises.
ICTY officials told AFP they could not immediately comment on Hartmann's detention.
Former ICTY prosecutor Carla Del Ponte told AFP in Geneva that Hartmann's arrest was "unacceptable."
"On such an important day that they have the verdict on Karadzic, I cannot understand it," said Del Ponte, now a member of the UN rights council's Commission of Inquiry for Syria.
"What I hope is that she will be released immediately, this afternoon," Del Ponte said.
The ex-prosecutor said she met Hartmann recently in Geneva and the former spokeswoman made clear she was willing to pay the fine once certain questions were settled.
"That was absolutely ridiculous what happened today," Del Ponte said.