The European Union’s Court of Human Rights (also known as the Strasbourg court) is busy usurping British law and needs to be stopped, one of this country’s most senior judges has warned.

The EU court now “considers itself as the equivalent of the Supreme Court of the United States, laying down a federal law of Europe,” Lord Hoffmann, the second most senior Lord of Appeal, said in a recent speech to the Judicial Studies Board.

Lord Hoffman warned that the Strasbourg court is now overruling senior British courts in areas which, he says, human rights are at best secondary issues.

In his address, Lord Hoffmann gave examples of the Strasbourg court being “unable to resist the temptation to aggrandise its jurisdiction.”

Interference on issues such as the right to silence, the use of hearsay evidence in court and even night flights at Heathrow Airport — “which sounds about as far from human rights as you could get” — showed the “basic flaw” in the system, Lord Hoffman argued.

“I regard all three of these cases, and many others which I could mention if there was time, as examples of what Bentham called ‘teaching grandmothers to suck eggs’.”

Furthermore, the court “lacks constitutional legitimacy,” he said, with its judges elected by a committee chaired by a Latvian politician and whose British representatives were “a Labour politician with a trade union background and no legal qualifications and a Conservative politician who was called to the Bar in 1972 but so far as I know has never practised.”

“We remain an independent nation with its own legal system, evolved over centuries of constitutional struggle and pragmatic change,” he said.

“I do not suggest belief that the United Kingdom’s legal system is perfect, but I do argue that detailed decisions about how it could be improved should be made in London, either by our democratic institutions or by judicial bodies which, like the Supreme Court of the United States, are integral with our own society and respected as such.”

* The Strasbourg court does not form part of the machinery of the EU, but the European Court of Justice (ECJ) does. The legal identity of the EU itself will be fully recognised if the Lisbon Treaty is eventually ratified and implemented.

The ECJ will then in effect be the supreme court of the European Union and will most likely replace the Strasbourg court.

Only the rejection of the Lisbon Treaty – and a vote for the BNP – will prevent British law being made subservient to foreign nations and incompetent legal entities. Let the British people not say that they were never warned.