Lord Bingham, the former lord chief justice and champion of human rights, has died of cancer aged 76, at his family home in Wales.

"He will be remembered as an exceptional man with a brilliant mind," said Professor Robert McCorquodale, director of the British Institute of International and Comparative Law.

As senior law lord Bingham ruled that detention of foreign terror suspects without charge breached their human rights, and after his retirement in 2008 he argued that Britain's invasion of Iraq in 2003 broke international law.

He was born Thomas Bingham in London. His father was an Ulster Presbyterian, and both his parents were doctors. At his Cumbrian boarding school he was said to be the brightest boy in 100 years.

He first studied history but went on to hold the top law offices, succeeding Lord Donaldson as master of the rolls from 1992 to 1996, and becoming lord chief justice of England and Wales from 1996 to 2000 and senior law lord until 2008.

Shami Chakrabarti, director of Liberty, recently described him as her hero, praising "his unrivalled combination of intellect, integrity and humility" and calling him "perhaps the greatest world jurist of our times".

Chakrabarti said: "His achievements are numerous but I will never forget his 2009 speech to Liberty's conference in defence of the Human Rights Act: 'Which of these rights, I ask, would we wish to discard? Are any of them trivial, superfluous, unnecessary? Are any of them un-British? There may be those who would like to live in a country where these rights are not protected but I am not of their number'.

"As long as people anywhere fight torture and slavery, treasure free speech, fair trials, personal privacy and liberty itself, Lord Bingham will be remembered."