The day after that decision, the International Criminal Court (ICC) indicted a member of the Sudanese government with war crimes and crimes against humanity in Darfur.

The coverage of the two cases was interesting, both for what was said and for the reactions that they provoked.

The events referred to in Bosnia-Herzegovina date back to almost 15 years ago, while the humanitarian crisis in Darfur is occurring right now. The ICC's decision also has far more wide-ranging implications for the current state of international relations, including US foreign policy.

Yet there have been far more articles and responses on the ICJ's Bosnian decision.

Misha Glenny, one of the best informed commentators on the mind-bogglingly complex story of Yugoslavia's disintegration, wrote a carefully-argued article situating the ICJ's judgement in contemporary political developments and arguing that it was the best decision for the future of a peaceful and stable Balkans. "Congratulations" he concluded.

Antonio Cassese, by contrast, argued that the judges had demanded an "unrealistically high standard of proof" before finding Serbia "legally complicit" in the genocide of Srebrenica.

The court accepted that "the Serbian government was paying salaries to Mladic and his colleagues, as well as providing them with financial and military assistance" and "was tightly connected to Serbia's political and military leadership."

This, he argued, should have been sufficient evidence of its culpability even without proof that Serbian officials sent specific instructions ordering the genocide to be carried out.

Cassese is one of the world's leading international lawyers and he chaired the UN commission of inquiry in Darfur, which led to the referral of this case to the ICC. Many commentators who have previously denounced this report for its failure to find credible evidence that genocide was being committed in Darfur, may have found themselves agreeing with the sentiments he expressed about Srebrenica.

Personally I think that this is one advantage of being guided by the facts when making a decision rather than trying to fit these to a pre-determined ideological position.

Another new contributor to "Comment is Free", Claire Fox, has also had reason to follow this case. She was associated with the magazine Living Marxism, whose claim that western journalists were exaggerating the scale of atrocities committed by Bosnian Serbs led to it being successfully sued for libel by ITN.

However, she chose not to focus on the ICJ's decision itself.

"I do not think this judgement really matters," she said, but instead decided to discuss the way in which "enthusiasts of humanitarian intervention" reduce all conflicts to simplistic black-and-white terms, an accusation which could be plausibly made against Ian Williams.

Having worked in the Balkans I have some sympathy with Claire's latter argument, although I think that the balance of history shows that Living Marxism's analysis in this case was obscenely wrong.

The Bosnian conflict has become shrouded in too many myths, however, and giving courts a greater role in determining questions of fact is surely part of the solution to this problem.

I have much less sympathy for the views expounded by John Laughland, in the only contribution to this debate which made it into The Guardian's printed edition.

It started with the deliberately misleading assertion that the ICJ decision "exonerated" Slobodan Milosevic from the separate charges of genocide he was facing at the International Criminal Tribunal for Yugoslavia and was then littered by more factual inaccuracies than I think I have ever come across in a single article.

Have a look at the following sentence, for example, and see how many you can spot:

The new ICC, created by Britain, also seems to operate on the basis that white men do not commit war crimes: its prosecutors are currently investigating two local wars in Africa while turning a blind eye to Iraq.

I spent a large part of the thread beneath my own column on Darfur explaining why I disagreed with Laughland's position, mainly in response to the polite and intelligent probing of one commenter.

One thing that this experience has taught me is that, while the topic of international legal justice is becoming increasingly important, it is something which many politicians and journalists are still struggling with.

It is remarkable how frequently both seem to completely miss the point of an international treaty, or ruling by an international body, despite the fact that these often have a direct bearing on foreign or domestic policies.

Again and again both rely on selective quotations, misrepresentations and straightforward invention to bolster their own arguments. But I do not think that they are going to be able to get away with it for much longer.

Conor Foley

The Guardian

Conor Foley is a humanitarian aid worker and a research fellow at the Human Rights Law Centre at the University of Nottingham in the United Kingdom.