Five years on, the legislation is permeating every walk of life and layer of society, from the royal wedding to the prison cell or gypsy campsite.

At first, government ministers were keen to play down the impact of the Human Rights Act, which incorporated the European Convention on Human Rights into British law.

The move meant that people could bring human rights claims in British courts, rather than go the lengthy route to Strasbourg for rulings that laws here were wanting.

Lord Irvine of Lairg, then Lord Chancellor, boasted one year after the Act came into force in autumn 2000 that the “critics and doom-mongers had been confounded”. The heavens had not fallen in; and many new claims had been thrown out by the courts, he said.

But five years on, the true impact is being felt. Nicholas Blake, QC, a leading barrister at the human rights chambers, Matrix, said: “For a couple of years, judges were very keen to say nothing’s changed; that it did not look as if a great deal had happened. But last December the law lords’ Belmarsh ruling changed all that.”

The eight to one ruling that detention of terrorist suspects without charge or trial was unlawful could not have happened without the Human Rights Act, he said.

“Common law is a vital tradition but it has been overrun by ministers in the shape of legislation too many times.”

Now, in the absence of a written constitution, the Human Rights Act is making its mark — so much so that the Tories have pledged to review it. But leading constitutional experts say it would be impossible to abolish the law, unless Britain pulled out as a signatory of the European Convention.

The Lord Chancellor resorted to the Act earlier this month to argue that the marriage of Prince Charles and Camilla Parker Bowles would be legal. In Scotland, the Executive faces a compensation bill after a ruling that prisoners rights were breached by being forced to “slop out”, and the Court of Appeal ruled that planning permission should be granted on human rights grounds to gypsies who entered land without permission, because the local authority had failed to provide gypsy sites.

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