Human rights" have fallen into the hands of the Euro-tollahs But the Convention is one thing, and its interpretation is something else. Lord Sumption is one of our few top judges with the courage to face this problem. In a big speech last year, he took Article 8 of the original Convention as his example. This guarantees everyone's right to a "respect for his private and family life, his home and his correspondence." "This perfectly straightforward provision was originally devised," he said, "as a protection against the surveillance state by totalitarian governments. But in the hands of the Strasbourg court it has been extended to cover the legal status of illegitimate children, immigration and deportation, extradition, aspects of criminal sentencing, abortion, homosexuality, assisted suicide, child abduction, the law of landlord and tenant, and a great deal else besides. None of these extensions are warranted by the express language of the Convention. They believe that the rule of law is too pure and beautiful a thing to be sullied by politicians, or even by the public. Judges speak darkly of "the rule of the majority" and "elected dictatorship." They are right to warn against mob rule. But, as Norman Tebbit crisply put it in a House of Lords debate on Monday, when the judges fought off a Government effort to halt the spread of judicial review, "I don't like unelected dictatorships, even if they sit in law courts." By taking Article 8, for instance, and stretching it from its simple original meaning into a doctrine of total personal autonomy, you are radically changing each society affected. If your ruling is made in Strasbourg, it is imposed on often faraway countries of which you may know little. Yet it binds our Parliament. "Unelected dictatorship" is not far wrong. The lawyers prefer to describe the Convention as a "living instrument" - something their brilliant minds can fashion for new tasks. But when such rulings are imposed on a country like ours, that instrument becomes a blunt one. They forget the Convention's very own preamble, which says that the "fundamental freedoms which are the foundations of peace and justice in the world are best maintained ... by an effective political democracy" combined with human rights. If we cannot make our own laws, we cannot have an effective democracy. Without democracy, "human rights" fall into the hands of the secular imams of the international judiciary; they become the sharia of the Euro-tollahs. In Britain, we are so fed up with our politicians that we forget we put them there. We see the law as an assertion of the rights of the individual against the state. It should be that, in part. But it should also be the wishes of the people, expressed in legislation made by those we choose for the task. The messy political battles out of which laws are forged are actually better than the high-altitude cogitations of great judicial minds, because they test what will and won't work. They win consent. Without consent, no law works. Once "human rights," in their modern sense, get a grip, a legal bureaucracy takes charge. Any public body, for example, can be sued for denying a person's "right to life" by not envisaging every possible occasion when that life might be endangered. Such bodies therefore live in fear. The police and Armed Forces have to preface their decisions with elaborate plans against what might go wrong. On foreign battlefields, such restrictions are tragicomic. The financial and moral cost is huge. Such imposed rights can lead to actual inhumanity. Just now, a row is raging in the world of adults with learning disabilities, because charities and local authorities are trying to break up residential communities where such people live together. In doing so, these authorities often invoke Article 5 of the Strasbourg Convention - the right to liberty - in order to insist that the disabled live "independently," i.e. alone. It is a pretty lonely liberty compared with the care they currently receive. This dictatorship of abstract rights is getting worse because Strasbourg, which in origin has nothing to do with the EU, is now bound up with it. The Charter of Fundamental Rights in the Lisbon Treaty takes the Convention and builds on it with baroque detail. Strasbourg is as nothing beside the self-aggrandising of the European Court of Justice (the court of the EU) in Luxembourg. Currently, the EU is trying to accede to the ECHR, which would take away what small national purchase we have on Strasbourg. If we don't get out, we shall get even deeper in. By way of reassurance, the Tories say that if they repeal the Human Rights Act they will introduce a British Bill of Rights instead. I wonder if that is such a brilliant idea. Most of our own judges will fall on it as hungrily as they did on Strasbourg. Would it not be better to use the Strasbourg Convention as an advisory manual and leave it at that? Our own Common Law has spent hundreds of years establishing rights that work. Australia, a Common Law country, has no national human rights system. Does anyone think Australian human beings lack decent rights? When Strasbourg told us we must give prisoners the vote, David Cameron said the idea made him physically sick. I'm not sure that its effect on his digestion matters much. But the state of our body politic does. "Europe" makes it sickly all the time. As Mr Cameron is belatedly learning, it will be the work of an entire generation (perhaps more) to restore it to health.