This is not due to a shortage of material – from stories about victims of crime successfully invoking rights when they are humiliated by the authorities, or more controversially, hedge fund managers invoking human rights to claim back profits – rights are constantly throwing up new issues which, judging by their responses, readers want to debate.
"Should we not be trying to get people out of prison?" Robin Munro, a London-based China researcher who has served as director of Human Rights Watch's Hong Kong office, says that wariness about Kamm goes back to his invoking human rights in the service of extending Most Favored Nation status.
Joe Mathews, a fellow at the Center for Social Cohesion at Arizona State University, argued on California politics website Fox&Hounds that such instances attack the integrity of the ballot initiative process and that the attorney general should be allowed to invoke a "human rights exception".
Cabinet ministers said the story was racist, and invoked the human rights commission in a high profile attack.
The declaration has been invoked by human rights activists and the international community to replace most of the world's dictatorships with democracies and to promote the rule of law in domestic and global affairs.
More recently, in his own cause, he invoked his human rights – with respect to privacy – to frustrate attempts to access correspondence that might shed light on a tax exemption thought to have cost millions to the exchequer.
Invoking international human rights standards, the United States also has condemned foreign governments that have held detainees incommunicado.... Yet even as American officials condemn other nations for detaining people indefinitely without access to a court or tribunal, authoritarian regimes elsewhere are pointing to U.S. treatment of the Guantánamo prisoners as justification for such actions.
At the same time, as a brief look at debates over the ethics of lead abatement studies shows, invoking a human rights framework raises important questions particularly how to balance practical limits and utopian goals.
First, as descriptors, globalized identity categories such as MSM (used by public health providers, the state and donors), and gay/lesbian (invoked by human rights activists and transnational NGOs) are too narrow to capture the fluid and highly context-specific ways in which gender and sexually nonconforming persons understand themselves in Bangladesh.
