"Eric Posner in WSJ on future of the international human rights movement"
"The international human rights movement, however, has an atavistic attachment to the "international" for its own sake, because its ideology and politics and class biases lead it to confuse the "international" with the "universal." It therefore leans procedurally toward ineffectual liberal internationalism, whereas the substantive victories of international human rights - in history as well as today - largely lie in the realm of democratic sovereigns enforcing values that are found among their electorates, or at least their governing elites, from the anti-slavery movements to todays anti-human trafficking campaigns. ...the choice between universal human rights values and democracy has long since been made by the human rights movement. It has always had a distinct hostility toward popular democracy. ...But it is also because democracy and democratic sovereignty challenge the hegemony of human rights elites and their writ to determine the content and canon of what Eric aptly calls the "expanding franchise" of "international human rights."
