The protections are claimed from below, most often against the claimant's own government

The argument

Opponents of the imperialism charge argue that the question is best settled by looking at who actually uses the framework and against whom. In practice, rights are invoked by people inside a country against the authorities of that country: lawyers acting for detainees, journalists facing prosecution, relatives of the disappeared, trade unions, religious and ethnic minorities, and communities whose land has been taken. The instrument is picked up by those with the least power in the situation and turned on those with the most. This matters to the structure of the argument rather than merely to its tone. Imperialism names something done to a population by an outside power, against the wishes of that population and for the benefit of the outsider. The ordinary case of a rights claim inverts every element: the population is using it, the target is not foreign, and the beneficiary is the claimant. Opponents argue that an account which cannot accommodate the standard case is not describing the thing but something adjacent to it. Opponents also draw attention to who makes the charge. It is advanced most often and most forcefully by governments and officials answering criticism of their own conduct, and much more rarely by those on the receiving end of that conduct. Where the people detained, prosecuted or dispossessed are asked, they generally invoke the framework rather than disowning it. Characterising their complaint as a foreign imposition, opponents argue, is a way of declining to answer it, and the argument functions to protect the authority being complained about.

Premises

Counter-arguments

Those who disagree reply that a framework can be imperial in origin and effect while being used locally, because the terms available to a complaint determine which complaints can be made at all. They argue that domestic campaigners work within categories set elsewhere, that funding and international recognition flow to those who use those categories, and that grievances which do not translate into the language of individual rights go unheard, which is how a framework exercises power without anyone having to impose it.

Rejecting the premises

[Rejecting P1] Overwhelmingly is unsupported, and the cases carrying most weight internationally are precisely those taken up by powerful states and institutions rather than by local claimants. [Rejecting P2] Imperialism has never required formal external imposition. It operates through the categories, funding and recognition available to local actors, which is how it outlives direct rule. [Rejecting P3] Local use is consistent with imperial structure. Colonial law was also invoked by colonised subjects against local officials, and that did not make it theirs. [Rejecting C] Who uses a framework does not settle whose framework it is, so the conclusion answers a question about origin and structure with an observation about distribution.