The Prime Minister is right to be concerned that the wrong balance is being struck between public safety and individual rights. The system is clearly out of kilter. The public are particularly bemused by Britain’s inability to deport convicted criminals, suspected terrorists and failed asylum-seekers. Circumstances have changed since the European Convention on Human Rights (ECHR) was created in 1953. And a changed world requires changed laws.

Article 3 of the convention has distorted British justice. Judges in Strasbourg and London have used the ban on torture and on “inhuman or degrading treatment or punishment” to insist that countries protect precisely the people whom they regard as most dangerous. Suspected terrorists who refuse to go home are being kept under effective house arrest, costing taxpayers millions as the Government appeals over judicial opposition to its “control orders”. Britain has spent more than a decade mired in legal arguments, refusing to extradite the suspected terrorist Rashid Ramda to our ally France. And the Afghan hijackers who have provoked Tony Blair’s ire have been granted leave to remain in Britain.

All countries must respect Article 3: they cannot derogate from it. So it is perfectly valid to ask, as Mr Blair has done in his open letter to his Home Secretary, why other EU countries seem to interpret it differently. If this sets him at odds with the judges, so be it. For judicial activism can be irrevers-ible. English law is not codified, as in many other EU countries; it is based upon precedent. Once English judges create a precedent, they project it all the way down the system. Many judges believe that they are preserving ancient rights, against a government they see as authoritarian. But some law lords, irked by the prospect of Lords reform and their own loss of prestige, have been playing out their personal grievances in a less than noble way, with consequences that they could surely never have intended. The judiciary now seems so remote from where the public stand that it could jeopardise precisely the British generosity that we all so prize.

Neverthless it is important to beware the new tendency to use “human rights” as a catch-all excuse. Naomi Bryant was murdered by Anthony Rice not because of human rights considerations — although an inquiry has found that these did divert probation officers’ attention — but because of the shocking incompetence that led to his release in the first place. Equally, it is becoming clear that the previous convictions of Naseem Hamed, the boxer sentenced last week for crippling another driver, were withheld from the judge not on human rights grounds, as first reported, but because of a mistake by the DVLA in misreading the Data Protection Act. Officialdom, beset with rules, too often takes the line of least resistance.

Just as “human rights” should not be overdone, nor should the influence of the Human Rights Act that incorpor- ated the convention into British law. Before this Act existed the European Court of Human Rights set the pre-cedent that even a slight risk to indi-viduals should take precedence over the danger they pose. The Government is now seeking to overturn this 1996 ruling in a test case, together with the Netherlands, Lithuania, Portugal and Slovakia. This suggests that new moves towards overhauling the ECHR and Article 3 are possible. Mr Blair should have forged such a consensus when he first raised the issue more than a year ago. But there is still time. The bottom line, however, must be clear. Britain must leave the ECHR if no change can be agreed, and set a timetable for doing so. Then a new convention, reflecting this country’s traditional concerns for human rights, must be drafted.