In 2020, the Brazilian Supreme Court decided to impose a series of restrictions on the indiscriminate use of police raids as a regular public safety strategy in the Rio de Janeiro "favelas", areas concentrating poor, non-white and migrant populations in the city. In the same year, in Johannesburg, muddied by the sanitary emergency of the COVID-19 pandemic, the South African Constitutional Court issued a similar judgment limiting the use of police raids under Section 13(7) of the South African Police Service Act (SAPS Act 68/1995) against the so-called "occupied" or "dark buildings" in the inner city. Although auspiciously concurrent, the two judgements yielded different legal, practical and political results, raising particular discontents and ways to narrativise moral–legal problems as violations of "human dignity". This paper presents the results of a comparative case study in Legal Anthropology between the two judgments based on the methodology of multi-sited ethnography (Marcus, 1995), using legal documents, media reports, semi-structured interviews, and observations of legal practitioners and direct beneficiaries in Rio de Janeiro and Johannesburg. It applies the concept of "techno-politics" by Antina Schnitzler (2014) to understand the political claim they make regarding human rights protection. What performative meanings does human dignity take on as it travels between different contexts within the so-called "global south"? How do globally circulating norms intervene in historically specific political arguments, and how are they appropriated and transformed? What can we learn (or not) about the value of citizenship and the current state of democracy in both cases from the transformations they undergo? What are the limits and possibilities of South-South comparisons and human rights activism? We argue that the attention to how the judicial process incorporates political questions, turning them into legal–technical ones, and conversely, produces significant political effects and can help us answer those questions.