The formal reprimand issued to His Honour George Bathurst-Norman last week is the most serious of the disciplinary powers available to the lord chief justice in cases of judicial misconduct, short of suspension or removal from office. Those latter powers would not have been appropriate for Bathurst-Norman because he had retired as a circuit judge in 2004 and was sitting part-time as a deputy in the case for which he was reprimanded. I would be surprised if he was asked to sit again.

Bathurst-Norman was brought in as the last-minute replacement for a judge who was due to try eight activists accused of conspiracy to cause criminal damage at a factory in Brighton involved in making weapons components for Israeli F-16 fighter aircraft. The defendants admitted causing damage but were acquitted because they believed they were protecting property in Gaza from destruction by the Israelis.

Several complaints were made by members of the public about reported remarks in the judge’s summing-up in June. The most notorious – misquoted when it was first reported – referred to Operation Cast Lead, nearly two years ago. Bathurst-Norman told the jury: ‘You may think that perhaps "hell on earth" would be an understatement of what the Gazans endured at that time.’

Complainants were told last week that the lord chief justice and the lord chancellor had found that ‘a number of observations made during the summing-up did not arise directly from the evidence at trial and could be seen as an expression of the judge’s personal views on a political question’.

That, said Lord Judge and Ken Clarke, was ‘an error’. But it has no effect on the jury’s verdict. In English law, an acquittal in the Crown court cannot be overturned unless new and compelling evidence comes to light or there has been interference with jurors or witnesses.

Another example of misconduct was highlighted by the International Criminal Court last week. Because the prosecutor, Luis Moreno-Ocampo, had refused to comply with their disclosure orders, three judges headed by Sir Adrian Fulford ‘stayed’ the trial of Thomas Lubanga, an alleged Congolese warlord, and ordered his release.

Last week, an appeal panel concluded that throwing out the case had been too drastic a remedy. Instead, Fulford’s court should have imposed daily fines on Moreno-Ocampo and waited to see whether these persuaded him to comply with court orders.

Since 2005, English law has allowed a prosecutor to appeal against a ruling by a trial judge that halts the case. But the prosecutor would regard it as axiomatic that, once a court has ruled, its decisions are binding.

Moreno-Ocampo’s ‘wilful non-compliance’, as the appeal judges described it, reminds us that respect for judicial decisions cannot be taken for granted. In England and Wales, we used to value judicial independence to such a high degree that, until 2006, not even the lord chief justice could discipline his fellow judges. The lord chancellor had power to sack a circuit judge for misbehaviour – and once did – but otherwise had to content himself with non-statutory rebukes and reprimands.

Judicial independence was one of the themes explored at a conference on the rule of law arranged by the Middle Temple in Cape Town last month. Justice Edwin Cameron, from the Constitutional Court of South Africa, gave three examples of cases in which supreme courts had ‘defied legal coherence, consistency and doctrine in pursuit of an overtly political objective’.

The first was a case from the days of apartheid in South Africa when Albie Sachs, later to become a member of the Constitutional Court himself, was denied access to reading and writing materials while detained without charge – even though there was no such requirement in the statute.

Cameron’s second example was Bush v Gore, the case in which the US Supreme Court effectively decided the result of the 2000 presidential election. And his third case was one where Zimbabwe’s High Court refused to respect a ruling that the country’s land reforms had been applied in a way which discriminated against white farmers on racial grounds.

Lord Mance, a justice of the UK Supreme Court, also delivered a paper stressing the need for judicial independence and appointment on merit. He pointed out that ‘many appointments and preferment processes remain highly politicised in Europe and of course the United States, as well as in some international courts including the International Criminal Court and, to some degree, the European Court of Justice’.

I suspect that the conference itself was rather more lively than might appear from a perusal of the papers on the Middle Temple website. According to local press reports, speakers expressed concern about continuing political interference in South Africa’s judicial process.

And what about Canada? I have just been sent a book of essays called Judicial Appointments: Balancing Independence, Accountability and Legitimacy. No publisher is named but we are told the book had its genesis ‘in a seminar organised by the Judicial Appointments Commission at the Canadian High Commission and attended by a range of commentators from United Kingdom jurisdictions’.

But not this commentator or, apparently, any other journalist. No doubt we would have asked why a British academic – Graham Gee – was saying that, during the past 30 years, the ‘ease with which federal ministers could reward supporters with appointments to judicial office has catapulted judicial appointments to the forefront of [Canadian] politics in ways that might surprise, and very possibly unnerve, the British observer’.

Compared with other countries, it seems we still have a judiciary to be proud of.