It used to be that PKR vice-president N Surendran, a human rights lawyer, understood the label as having to do with the articulation and defence of civil liberties.

That was the conventional view of what human rights entailed for large numbers of its advocates, including him.

Surendran made a career out of this conception of human rights that was significant enough to gain him one of the appointed vice-presidential slots in PKR in late 2010, after the party's triennial elections that year...