The courts have not been swamped by cases following the implementation of the Human Rights Act show figures published on Tuesday.

Human rights campaigners, Liberty, have welcomed the figures as giving "the lie once and for all to the 'floodgates' scaremongerers" but warned that the legislation was not "an end itself" and urged that more needs to be done to safeguard rights in Labour's second term.

Figures published by the Lords Chancellors Department and given in evidence on Monday to the Joint Parliamentary Committee on Human Rights by the lord chancellor, Lord Irvine, show that "there has been no significant impact on the length or complexity of hearings and no significant increase in outstanding cases at any level of the system".

The number of outstanding cases of judicial review has actually fallen over a year from 2,830 to 1,861. A slight increase in applications for judicial review is explained by the LCD by changes in immigration and asylum procedures with only 17 per cent of cases raising a human rights issue.

The LCD claims that "the vast majority" of cases would have been lodged even without human rights legislation and that there have been "less than a dozen issues that could be termed 'new'".

Mary Cunneen, associate director of Liberty, says that the legislation has had a "positive effect beyond the courtroom, with people taking steps to comply with it rather than go to law".

Cunneen argues that the jury is still out on the five month old legislation and calls on Labour to do more rather less to legislate for human rights.

"It's still early days, but it is already beginning to lead to some important developments - notably the gradual emergence of privacy law. But we are concerned that judges are currently taking quite a restrictive view and we are also concerned that people see the Human Rights Act as an end in itself. In reality, it's a beginning, and we believe the next government must introduce further legislation to consolidate and protect basic rights in our fast-changing society," she told ePolitix.