FORMER Singaporean lawyer Gopalan Nair, accused of insulting two High Court judges here, will get his day in court in September.

At a pre-trial conference in the High Court on Tuesday, Magistrate Denise Wong set aside two weeks - Sept 8 to 19 - for the trial.

But with almost two months away before the trial starts, Nair's lawyer Chia Ti Lik said they would be making an application for Nair to return to the US first, where he is now a resident.

As a condition of his bail, the 58-year-old was required to surrender his passport to the police.

The two charges carry a possible jail term of up to one year, $5,000 fine, or both, each.

The first charge relates to a blog post Nair had written, accusing Justice Belinda Ang of 'prostituting herself' to Minister Mentor Lee Kuan Yew and Prime Minister Lee Hsien Loong.

He made the comments after he returned to Singapore to observe a three-day hearing presided over by Justice Ang to assess damages in a defamation suit that PM Lee and Minister Mentor had won against the Singapore Democratic Party, its secretary-general Chee Soon Juan and his sister Chee Siok Chin.

The second charge concerns an e-mail he allegedly sent in 2006 to Justice Lai Siu Chiu while she was presiding over a contempt of court case, also involving Chee Soon Juan.

In it, Nair implied that she and the others worked against critics of the PAP. He called Justice Lai and others 'corrupt'.