In response to the human rights 'crisis' of his time, this dean of human rights law laid out a programme for what Joseph Slaughter calls 'the hi-jacking of human rights' - that is, he sought to win the language away from anticolonialists, who used it to defend self-determination and anti-racism, and reinvent human rights as an (apolitical) adjunct to US power. The central premise of this programme was that there was no necessary conflict between the particular interests of the United States and the universal values of 'humanity'.

Jessica Whyte, The Morals of the Market, loc. 449