In a celebrated passage from its ruling in the Yerodia case, dealing with immunity to criminal prosecution, the International Court of Justice (ICJ) stated that while a head of State could not be prosecuted by the national courts of another State, he or she was subject to prosecution by ‘certain international criminal courts’. The Court said that

The Court distinguished this case from that of prosecution before what it described, in the same paragraph, as ‘foreign jurisdiction’ or, alternatively, a ‘court of one State’. The ICJ did not elaborate on the criteria for determining how to distinguish between ‘international courts’ and ‘national courts’. But there can be no doubt that it recognised the distinction between the two types of bodies and that it also, at least indirectly, pronounced itself on the legality of the institutions.