‘Cameron tells Euro judges to stop meddling in British justice,’ the Mail on Sunday headlined its well-sourced report at the weekend. Anticipating the prime minister’s speech to the Council of Europe’s parliamentary assembly on Wednesday afternoon, the newspaper said that David Cameron would demand major reforms to the European Court of Human Rights (ECtHR).

In particular, we were told, the government wanted Strasbourg to accept more UK court rulings. The Sunday Telegraph, whose political editor had apparently received a similar Downing Street briefing, added that the prime minister would call for a ‘filtering system’ to stop the human rights judges dealing with cases that had already been resolved ‘properly’ by national courts.

Both stories, followed up in Monday’s papers, suggested that the government was angry with the ECtHR’s decision last week to block the deportation to Jordan of the suspected terrorist Abu Qatada.

As it turned out, the ECtHR very nearly took the wind out of the prime minister’s sails by deciding two of last week’s three cases in the UK’s favour. The Strasbourg judges accepted the government’s argument that extraditing two alleged murderers to face life imprisonment in the US would not expose them to inhuman or degrading treatment. It also accepted, though only by a majority of four to three, that a ‘whole-life’ tariff for murderers convicted in the UK was not inhuman or degrading. And even the minority view - that a review mechanism was needed - would not have caused the Ministry of Justice any real problems.

Inconveniently for Cameron’s narrative, Strasbourg found in the government’s favour on the most important point at issue in the Abu Qatada case, concluding that diplomatic assurances from Jordan would be sufficient to ensure that the ‘radical cleric’ would not be at risk of ill-treatment. If the government had lost on this point, it would not have been able to rely on memorandums of understanding with Jordan or other countries.

The sticking point was the risk that evidence against Abu Qatada had been obtained by torturing witnesses, rendering any trial he might face unfair. Unless the Jordanians can find a way of trying Abu Qatada without relying on tainted evidence, it is likely that he will have to be released on bail next month and have his activities restricted under one of the new terrorism prevention and investigation measures that have now replaced control orders.

Surely the prime minister is entitled to argue that Strasbourg should respect the views of the English judges? Certainly, but which ones? Three judges in the Court of Appeal accepted in 2008 that Abu Qatada could not be tried in Jordan because there was a high probability that evidence obtained through torture would be admitted at his trial. That decision was overturned by the House of Lords in 2009, but only on the rather feeble ground that the law lords couldn’t be sure that a trial in Jordan would be unfair. The Strasbourg judges were entitled to favour the principled English ruling over the pragmatic one.

Perhaps Cameron has been paying too much attention to the views of his former Oxford tutor, Professor Vernon Bogdanor. Writing in The Times last week, Bogdanor claimed the judges were powerless when rights under the Human Rights Act were infringed: the ‘only remedy’ would be for parliament to change the law. The former professor of government often excuses himself on the ground that he is not a lawyer; and this time it showed. As Professor Graham Zellick QC pointed out in a letter to the newspaper, Bogdanor was referring only to those very few cases where an act of parliament was incompatible with the European Convention on Human Rights (ECHR). ‘The vast majority of Human Rights Act claims are not challenges to primary legislation but to subordinate legislation (which can be struck down) and to decisions of ministers, public authorities and courts where the full range of remedies is available’, Zellick explained.

Cameron would do much better to read a perceptive and important Bingham Centre lecture by the former lord chancellor, Lord Irvine of Lairg. Perhaps because it was delivered 11 days before Christmas, Irvine’s paper did not receive the attention it deserved.

Its message was that the UK courts had misunderstood a fundamental provision in the Human Rights Act 1998. The provision is section 2(1), which says that a court deciding a question that has arisen in connection with an ECHR right must ‘take into account’

Most people would understand that phrase as meaning ‘have regard to’ or ‘bear in mind’, Irvine noted. But the UK courts have wrongly treated it as meaning ‘is bound by’. As Lord Rodger famously said in 2009, ‘Argentoratum locutum: iudicium finitum – Strasbourg has spoken, the case is closed.’

This approach - sometimes called the Ullah rule or ‘mirror’ principle - is not as perverse as it seems. UK judges have tried to mirror Strasbourg rulings to avoid the risk of a contradictory ruling from the European court which, if ignored by the government, would lead to a breach of the UK’s treaty obligations.

But ‘take into account’ means that the domestic court must always decide the case for itself. As Irvine says, ‘a judge’s concern for the UK’s… standing in international relations can never justify disregarding the clear statutory direction which section 2 of the Human Rights Act provides.’

And he should know, having drafted it. Whatever Cameron may think of the legislation, it remains Irvine’s lasting political legacy.