Supreme Court judges have ruled that evicting a woman from her council home for failing to pay her rent whilst running up arrears of £3500, would breach her human rights under the controversial European Convention on Human Rights.

Paul Shamplina, of Landlord Action believes decisions such as this simply encourage others to use the human rights laws to avoid eviction.

He said: “I am astounded by this decision. Many will be asking the obvious question: what about the rights of the landlord? In recent months, we have presented many case studies where landlords are facing, or are close to facing, repossession of their rental property due to tenants falling behind on the rent.

“This ruling well and truly opens up the floodgates. I suspect that we will see a lot of tenants refusing to pay their rent, and then hiding behind human rights laws.

“From the landlords that we speak to on a daily basis, it is clear that many are not impressed with this sort of tenant empowerment – not when they are the ones losing out financially. Many will be demanding answers from stakeholders in Strasbourg and here in the UK, and rightly so.

“Put this judgement against the current background of austerity. Taking on cases like this is not cheap. I am pretty certain that it is the taxpayer that has footed the bill for Hounslow Council to make this defence. Whilst I agree that this is fundamentally the right thing to do in this case, I also believe that it wasn’t necessary – not for cases like this where it is plain and simple common sense that tells us this lady should be evicted,” concluded Shamplina.