The European Court of Human Rights at Strasbourg fails on all these counts. Only one of its judges is British. All are political appointees from 47 countries, often quite ignorant of the law, and sometimes from countries with very low levels of freedom. We can’t put them in, and we can’t get them out. And when they opine, they do not stick to natural justice, but give their views, in accordance with all-embracing human rights doctrine, about everything under the sun. They clothe politics in legal robes.  On Thursday, the president of the Strasbourg Court, Jean-Paul Costa, said that only “the dictatorship of the colonels” in Greece in the late 1960s had ignored the rulings of his court. Did Britain, he asked, want to behave like those dictators because it did not like his court’s ruling that our prisoners must have the vote? What should worry Judge Costa is that it is not our rulers who so resent his court (though I think Mr Cameron is genuinely angry): it is the rest of us. Do you honestly believe that Judge Costa and colleagues should have the final decision about how we run our affairs, about who can vote in our country? I don’t, and I would feel no moral qualms about defying them. Indeed, I increasingly feel that if we do not defy them, or put them back in their box, we shall lose popular consent for the entire notion of human rights.  Take a current example. The Government is suggesting that civil partnerships for homosexuals do not go far enough. The law should be changed, it says, so that partnership ceremonies can be held in places of worship and there can be a religious element in the vows. It proposes that homosexuals should be legally able to marry one another.  In the past 30 years, attitudes towards homosexuality have changed. There is a growing view that even conservative-minded people should welcome homosexual marriage. It is a way of extending the virtues of stability and lifelong commitment, it is argued.  There is sense in the thought, although I would counter that conservative-minded people should think hard and long (a couple of centuries, maybe?) before deciding to overthrow the universal understanding of all cultures and faiths at all past times that marriage means a contract between a man and a woman. But if what was at stake was only a matter of freedom, it would be wrong to resist.  After all, the old prohibitions on homosexual acts were repulsive because the law attacked personal freedom. Private life was smashed. Bullying and fear resulted. Freedom now rightly prevails; so if homosexuals want to swear vows to one another in a church or mosque, and can find a clergyman unorthodox or an imam suicidal enough to preside, why should the law forbid them?  But that, of course, is not how things work in the era of proactive human rights. On Thursday, Edward Leigh, the Conservative MP, pointed out that, if the law changed, “sooner or later’” a priest will be sued “for refusing to conduct a gay marriage in church… Even if our own courts stand firm, we can place little faith in the European Court of Human Rights.”  He is surely right. Those who argue that there is no compulsion here are being disingenuous. We have already seen that people who conscientiously object to homosexual acts are no longer allowed to live by their beliefs. Adoption agencies cannot practice if they refuse adoption to gay couples. Nor can landladies refuse them bed-and-breakfast. You find similar problems in other fields – a Jewish school which is not allowed to define who is a Jew, a nurse forbidden to pray with a patient.  It turns out that the current human rights culture is not an extension of freedom for all. It is more like a zero-sum game, in which new rights for any group favoured by the currently prevailing doctrines deny existing rights to unfashionable (often called “-phobic”) groups who think differently.  In an article on this page in 2000, Cherie Booth argued in favour of the Human Rights Act, which her husband’s government was just bringing in. “The Human Rights Act is about much more than what happens in the courtroom,” Mrs Blair wrote. “It is about creating a new culture.” Yes, a new culture in which our traditions, beliefs and democracy are replaced by doctrines defined and imposed by lawyers.
It is not 'appalling&rsquo; when judges protect natural justice. But it is a problem    when they turn political, writes Charles Moore.