The situation was explosive. The hardmen of the SAS were lurking in readiness, armed police surrounded the Boeing 727 as it sat on the runway at Stansted airport. Inside, armed hijackers held passengers and crew to ransom.

When, after 70 hours of tense negotiations they gave up, it was seen as a classic operation, a victory for common sense. And so it turns out to have been: for the hijackers.

Mr Justice Sullivan’s ruling last week that the nine hijackers can stay in this country indefinitely because to return them home to liberated Afghanistan would be an abuse of their human rights suggests that crime pays after all.

The prime minister, for once in tune with the majority of the electorate, thought otherwise: “It is an abuse of common sense.”

But then common sense — as it is commonly understood — doesn’t seem much in demand of late. As witness drug-addicted prisoners from jails across Britain suing the Home Office for violating their human rights by subjecting them to the “cold turkey” of enforced withdrawal.

They were encouraged by £2,400 awarded Robert Napier, an armed robber in Barlinnie prison, Glasgow, who complained the practice of “slopping out” his cell degraded his human rights.

The case of the paedophile John Callison, who demanded compensation because prison was boring, was rejected. But not before running up large sums in legal aid.

All this pales before the case of the rapist Anthony Rice, who despite psychiatric reports recommending he be kept incarcerated was freed from jail by a probation panel convinced that his human rights were being abused — and within months murdered a woman. But then that’s par for the course, with a parole and probation service in chaos while the Home Secretary is forced to resign because more than 1,000 foreign prisoners who could – and in most cases should – have been deported were released, often to offend again.

Everybody’s whipping boy is the Human Rights Act, hailed in 1998 as one of this government’s great achievements not only by the prime minister but also, more tellingly, his wife, a lawyer whose Matrix chambers have benefited massively by its introduction.

Now even Tony Blair, a lawyer, professes not to understand its working or implications. So is it the law that is an ass, or just the lawyers?

Some of the press has gone into overdrive, proclaiming that Britain has once again fallen victim to foreign diktat and political correctness. Why don’t the French or the Germans have these problems? Max Hastings, writing in the Daily Mail, said: “As ever, Britain is the most scrupulous adherent to this law.”

But this popular belief that Britain is the good citizen in a corrupt Europe embodies two fallacies: first — that we alone apply the rules when sometimes it is our own officials who interpret them bizarrely; second — that there is one Europe out there, rather than 24 other countries.

The tension between human rights and the rule of law is as old as the concept of individual freedom. Which is not all that old.

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