In a scathing article for The Telegraph, Lord Sumption accuses judges of the European Court of Human Rights of having “emancipated themselves from the [ECHR] and built a new scheme of human rights, extending far beyond the prevention of tyranny, and into nearly every aspect of human life”.

The court has made “a claim to legislative powers without boundaries” and is therefore “contrary to the rule of law” and “fundamentally undemocratic”, he adds.

He concludes: “When the Human Rights Act 1998 incorporated the convention into UK law, it was billed in the white paper as ‘bringing rights back home’. It has in fact had the opposite effect. It has removed rights from the democratic arena and exported them to Strasbourg.

“The time has come to bring rights back home by withdrawing from the convention and re-enacting it in an ordinary domestic statute, with provisions requiring it to be interpreted exclusively by the UK courts according to its language, like any other statute.

“The result would be to retain the legal protection of real human rights but to exclude the spurious ones coming from the increasingly erratic, ambitious and irresponsible tribunal in Strasbourg.

“That way, we could have whatever additional rights we chose, while discarding or amending those that we consider unsuitable for our conditions, or not in the public interest or for which there is no democratic mandate.”