Britain has claimed success in convincing its fellow 46 members of the Council of Europe, Malta included, to accept changes that would significantly reduce the powers of the European Court of Human Rights.

Britain is seeking an amendment to the European human rights convention as a result of which the Strasbourg court’s role would be reduced to reviewing decisions made in Westminster and by the British courts. The number of cases referred to Strasbourg would be reduced by a “filtering” process to cut its present backlog of 150,000.

The changes would see the court no longer intervening in cases in which the national courts have properly applied the European human rights convention so that major breaches could be dealt with more effectively.

Over the years, the court has ruffled feathers in Malta, in particular in the relatively recent crucifix case, which had sought to ban the crucifix from public school classrooms. The court had first ruled in favour of a ban but that verdict was overturned on appeal.

The UK has expressed its belief that the court has become too powerful and that some of its decisions have discredited the concept of human rights. It points to Strasbourg’s recent ruling to block the deportation of extremist cleric Abu Qatada to Jordan that infuriated British politicians and sparked a huge public outcry. In 2009, the European court awarded Abu Qatada and eight other terror suspects £75,000 in damages after ruling that they should never have been detained without trial. Up until last week, lawyers for another radical cleric, Abu Hamza, were also able to use an appeal to the court to delay his extradition to the US on terrorism charges.

Both cases had prompted a hail of gunfire towards the ECHR judges, particularly in the tabloids. Back in 2008, UK newspaper The Sun had aimed its guns at the nine judges from the European Court of Human Rights after they issued an interim order blocking the extradition of Muslim cleric Abu Hamza from the UK to the USA.

The Sun let loose with a tirade against the judges, and even went so far as to single out Maltese Judge Bonello – describing Malta as an “obscure country”, the judges hearing the case as “euro clowns” and even questioning the judges’ credentials to hear the case since their countries are “unlikely to be targets in the war on terror”.

Just this week, the Daily Mail asked: “How can they tell us how to run our country?” remarking that the court’s youngest judge was given the job when she was just 33 and that she has no experience as a senior judge, while seven out of 11 top judges at the ECHR “have little or no judicial experience”.

In a rant against all 11 judges, the paper said of Malta-appointed judge Vincent de Gaetano: “Maltan (sic) Vincent de Gaetano was an academic before taking up a job as a judge, then deputy attorney-general and before arriving at ECHR he was chief justice of Malta.”

Judge de Gaetano was one of the judges hearing the Abu Qatada case, and is expected to be one of the judges presiding over a second case after Qatada lodged another appeal against his deportation to Jordan.

Speaking in the wake of Thursday’s agreement, British Attorney-General Dominic Grieve said of this week’s declaration: “This Declaration makes clear that the primary responsibility for guaranteeing human rights rests with the government, parliament and courts of a country. It sets out clearly that the Court should not routinely overturn the decisions made by national authorities – and it should respect different solutions and different approaches between states as being legitimate.

“The Court is there to ensure the highest protection of fundamental rights. This agreement secures this vital position for the court and will allow it to do the job it was created to do and protect individuals across Europe from state oppression.”

Speaking at the Council of Europe Conference in Brighton on Thursday, where the historic reforms to the Court and the Convention were agreed upon, UK Justice Secretary Kenneth Clarke said that the UK’s pledge to reform the ECHR European Court of Human Rights has been successfully fulfilled. “These reforms represent a substantial package of reform and are a significant step towards realising the goals that the Prime Minister set out in Strasbourg.

“Taken together, these changes should mean fewer cases being considered by the court. Those that it considers should be allegations of serious violations or major points of interpretation of the Convention and will be processed without the scandalous delays we are seeing at present.

“The court will not normally intervene where national courts have clearly applied the Convention properly. These reforms strengthen the commitment of all the member states to the obligations of the Convention and will improve the ability of the Court to enforce these obligations sensibly.”

Reform of the court was one of the key priorities for the UK’s chairmanship of the Council of Europe and the foundations of today’s reforms were laid in a speech to the court by UK Prime Minister David Cameron earlier this year. In it, Cameron outlined the challenges faced by the court as being:

• the court should be free to deal with the most serious violations of human rights;

• it should not be swamped with an endless backlog of cases;

• the court should ensure that the right to individual petition counts;

• it should not act as a small claims court;

• the court should hold us all to account;

• it should not undermine its own reputation by over-ruling national decisions where it does not need to.

The agreement will tackle each of these issues by:

• amending the Convention to include the principles of subsidiarity and the margin of appreciation;

• amending the Convention to tighten the admissibility criteria so that trivial cases can be thrown out and the court can focus on cases of serious abuse;

• reducing the time limit for claims from six months to four;

• improving the selection process for judges; and setting out a roadmap for further reform.