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Up to 20 men regarded as Britain’s most dangerous terror suspects can challenge their detention after Britain’s highest court ruled that three of them had been denied a fair trial.

The men, who have been held under virtual house arrest under the Government’s control order regime, won the unanimous backing of a panel of nine law lords, on the grounds that the suspects did not know what they were accused of or what evidence was being used against them.

The judgment, hailed by human rights groups, means that other suspects who have not been given sufficient evidence to enable them to defend themselves can now challenge the control orders in court. One of the panel, Lord Hope of Craighead, said: “If the rule of law is to mean anything, it is in cases such as these that the court must stand by principle. It must insist that the person affected be told what is alleged against him.”

The ruling prompted calls for the scrapping of control orders, which restrict suspects’ movements on the basis of secret hearings without charge or a trial, and the acceptance instead of evidence based on intercepts, which is currently inadmissible in court.

Lord Pannick, QC, the crossbench peer who represented the lead appellant, AF — the three men are known only by their initials — said that Alan Johnson, the Home Secretary, ought to scrap the regime entirely. “Since the Home Secretary can no longer impose control orders without telling the controlees the substance of the case they have to meet, the right decision — legally and politically — would be to abandon the discredited control order regime and concentrate on prosecuting in the criminal courts those against whom there is evidence of wrongdoing.

Mr Johnson made clear that the Government would contest each case vigorously. “This is an extremely disappointing judgment. Protecting the public is my top priority and this judgment makes that task harder. The Government will continue to take all steps we can to manage the threat presented by terrorism.”

He said that all control orders would remain in force for the time being: “We will continue to seek to uphold them in the courts. In the meantime we will consider this judgment and our options carefully.

“We introduced control orders to limit the risk posed by suspected terrorists whom we can neither prosecute nor deport. The Government relies on sensitive intelligence material to support the imposition of a control order, which the courts have accepted would damage the public interest to disclose in open court.

“We take our obligations to human rights seriously and, as such, we have put strong measures in place to try to ensure that our reliance on sensitive material does not prejudice the right of individuals to a fair trial.”

Control orders were introduced in March 2005 as a means of holding terror suspects who had not been charged or tried and where the evidence was largely sensitive and derived from intelligence sources. Suspects are electronically tagged and held under curfew. They are also restricted in whom they can meet and where they can go.

This is the third setback for ministers in their efforts to deal with terror suspects. The law lords had previously ruled that to hold foreign terror suspects without charge or trial in Belmarsh prison was a breach of their human rights and unlawful.

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