John Denham, chairman of the influential parliamentary Home Affairs Committee, said British courts were not giving sufficient weight to the carefully considered decisions of Parliament taken in the public interest.

Justice Sullivan quashed the orders on six men -- all understood to be Iraqis -- on the basis that they contravened the European Convention on Human Rights restrictions on detention without trial.

The controversial orders are imposed on individuals suspected of involvement in terrorism where there is not enough evidence to bring a prosecution. They entail a variety of restrictions ranging from tagging and curfew to house arrest.

Wednesday's appellants are understood to be banned from leaving their homes for 18 hours a day, cannot use cell phones or the internet, and are not allowed visitors who have not previously been cleared by the authorities.

"Their liberty to live a normal life within their residences is so curtailed as to be non-existent for all practical purposes," the judge said.

He concluded that as the orders were unlawful under the ECHR, the home secretary had no power to make them and they must therefore all be repealed.

The government will now appeal both Wednesday's ruling and an April judgment in which Sullivan overturned a previous order. The restrictions will remain in place until the hearing, expected Monday.

If ministers fail to overturn the decision, they will be forced to find another way of dealing with terror suspects who cannot be prosecuted due to lack of evidence. Opting out of parts of the ECHR is a further option; however such a move would have deeply awkward political ramifications both at home and internationally.

Britain, like many democratic nations, is engaged in a fractious debate about the proper balance between civil liberties and public security, and between executive, legislative and judicial power.

Prime Minister Tony Blair has repeatedly warned the judiciary that he is not afraid to take them on should they continue to thwart the government's will on matters of national security. He has also at times signaled his willingness to withdraw from parts of the ECHR, though has later retreated from this option, having been advised, no doubt, of the political and legal difficulties of such a move.

Whether this latest development will prompt an end to his equivocation on the issue is as yet unclear.

Denham called for urgent action to tackle what he called an "emerging constitutional crisis" over the roles of the judiciary and the executive. Speaking on BBC Radio Thursday, he said that judges in other European countries gave far more weight to parliamentary decisions in the public interest than British courts.

"There is a bit of a constitutional crisis emerging here about the way in which the judges and the courts approach these issues," he said.

"When many of us, as I did, supported the Human Rights Act (which incorporates the ECHR into British law) and indeed still support it, we thought that on great matters of state of this sort -- if the elected parliament had taken a careful view of what was in the wider public interest -- that would be given considerable weight by the courts. That doesn't seem to be what's happening at the moment.

He called for a debate between lawmakers, ministers and judges to settle the dispute "before we get into too big a conflict."

The country knew from the July 7 bombings that police and security services were taking "life and death decisions" on monitoring suspects, and needed such mechanisms to protect the public, he argued.

The control orders were established in spring 2005 -- after a lengthy parliamentary battle -- as a replacement for the detention without charge of foreign terror suspects at Belmarsh Prison, nicknamed Britain's Guantanamo Bay.

Britain's highest court, the House of Lords, had struck down the detention powers in December 2004, determining them to be in breach of human rights legislation.

The Conservatives and the Liberal Democrats, who both opposed the control orders in Parliament, said Wednesday's ruling demonstrated the pitfalls of rushed, ill-considered legislation.

Lib Dem Home Affairs Spokesman Nick Clegg criticized Denham's warning, saying: "This is not a constitutional crisis, but a ruling on the specific scope and severity of six control orders."

He added: "Yet another attack on our judiciary is the last thing we now need in response to such a sensitive decision."

Human rights lawyers and campaigners welcomed the ruling and warned the government against attempting to undermine the independence of the judiciary.

The human rights lawyer Michael Mansfield rejected Denham's "crisis" claim, insisting judges were simply performing the role they were put there to do.

"Although the government has been elected, the elected democracy has put in place a judiciary whose job it is to monitor the extent to which legislation is incompatible with human rights."

The government wished to "'lock up people we think are suspects and subversive'" he said. "We can't tolerate a society in which a government is allowed that view untrammeled."

The Blair government has often been accused of implementing authoritarian yet ineffective legislation as a knee-jerk response to domestic or world-wide events; critics note it has introduced 54 criminal justice bills since taking office in 1997.

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