As I have explained in a lengthy piece on the Standpoint website, the judge would presumably say he was simply reminding the jury of the evidence they had heard. But that has not satisfied his critics and we wait to hear whether the Lord Chief Justice regards Bathurst Norman's remarks as having gone further than necessary.

At least they attracted some coverage in the media. How many people realised that the former president of Liberia was on trial for crimes against humanity until Naomi Campbell was called as a prosecution witness in August? I suspect that even fewer people could correctly identify the court that is trying Charles Taylor (the Special Court for Sierra Leone) or the court near The Hague whose premises it is using (the Special Tribunal for Lebanon).

In another part of the Dutch capital, the world's first permanent international criminal court is struggling to complete its first trial — eight years after the court was established. In July, three judges headed by Sir Adrian Fulford ordered the release of Thomas Lubanga, an alleged Congolese warlord, because the prosecutor, Luis Moreno Ocampo, had refused to comply with the court's orders. The defendant remains in custody pending the prosecutor's appeal.

Writing recently in Counsel magazine, Sir Adrian pointed out that it was critical to the success of the International Criminal Court for its judges to be "fearlessly independent". In his view, the countries that created the court bore a heavy responsibility for choosing judges who could demonstrate their disregard of politics.

He would not have needed to say this if his views had been shared by the governments concerned. In Selecting International Judges, a new study published by OUP, a team of four international lawyers produce evidence that judges have been selected for the ICC and the International Court of Justice as "a result of overtly political considerations or even nepotism". Even candidates chosen through transparent and formal consultation "must work their way through a highly politicised election process".

The lawyers who researched the study argue that "urgent steps need to be taken to limit the growing and pervasive role of extraneous political factors in order to ensure that politics does not overwhelm the prospects for selecting the very best judges for the international courts".

Will our own courts fare any better?