Dominic Raab is proceeding with extreme caution in his ‘overhaul’ of human rights

Since Dominic Raab, the deputy prime minister and justice secretary, announced at the Conservative Party conference that he would “overhaul” the Human Rights Act, the legal world has been agog to find out what this might consist of.

The only clue in his speech to the nature of the overhaul was his citing of an old case of a violent man convicted of beating his ex-partner who avoided deportation by claiming the right to family life. After Raab’s speech, lawyers pointed out that the law had since been changed.

Raab’s interview with The Sunday Telegraph was his first chance to set out in more detail what he plans to do about the Act, which is important because it gives direct effect in British law to the rights – including the right to private and family life – set out in the European Convention on Human Rights.

In fact, the interview took us little further forward. The deputy prime minister said he is devising a “mechanism” to allow the government to introduce legislation to “correct” court judgments that ministers believe are “incorrect”. Yet this sounds very much like a description of what happens already.

In the 2009 case mentioned in his conference speech, for example, the UK law was clarified in the Immigration Act 2014. If ministers think that human rights law is being misinterpreted by the courts, it is obviously open to them to ask parliament to legislate to clarify, or “correct”, that interpretation, provided the clarification is compatible with the European Convention.

The problem that ministers often have, however, is that the fundamental rights set out in the Convention sometimes make their job difficult, or produce outcomes with which they disagree and which they are unable to “correct” in British legislation. Defenders of human rights law would say that this is evidence of the Convention doing its job: it is designed to make life difficult for governments, by defending the rights of unpopular minorities, such as prisoners or immigrants.

That is precisely why Theresa May, when she was home secretary, pushed David Cameron as prime minister to consider drastic measures such as withdrawing from the European Court of Human Rights, which enforces the Convention, or even repudiating the Convention itself. It was notable, however, that she didn’t pursue these ideas when she became prime minister herself.

Raab has been marinated in these arguments all his political career. He wrote a book criticising the Human Rights Act when he was chief of staff to David Davis, shadow home secretary, in 2009, and so he is keenly aware of how difficult it would be to disentangle the UK from the European Convention and its court.

This may explain some of the careful wording of his Sunday Telegraph interview. He said: “We want the Supreme Court to have a last word on interpreting the laws of the land, not the Strasbourg court.” Which does not rule out the Strasbourg court having the last word on interpreting the European Convention, which the UK is treaty-bound to follow.

And he hinted at a surprisingly modest plan to curtail the use by British courts of the powers of judicial review, which many Conservatives regard as a constraint on the power of government to enact its democratic mandate (some Labour former ministers, who also chafed against such powers when they were in government, agree with them).

Raab said that judicial review has been used as an extra layer of appeal in immigration cases. “We have something like 750 of these a year; the success rate is 3 per cent,” he said. “We’re going to cut out all of that.” That is nothing to do with the Human Rights Act, and if that is all that his “overhaul” amounts to, he risks disappointing the audience that applauded him politely at the party conference in Manchester.