Since the end of the cold war, human rights has become the dominant vocabulary in foreign affairs. The question after September 11 is whether the era of human rights has come and gone.
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Human rights matter because they help people to help themselves. They protect their agency. By agency, I mean more or less what Isaiah Berlin meant by "negative liberty", the capacity of each individual to achieve rational intentions without let or hindrance. By rational, I do not necessarily mean sensible or estimable, merely those intentions that do not involve obvious harm to other human beings. Human rights is a language of individual empowerment, and empowerment for individuals is desirable because when individuals have agency, they can protect themselves against injustice.
Michael Ignatieff, New York Times, 5 February 2002
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Michael Ignatieff, Human Rights as Politics and Idolatry, Princeton University Press, Princeton 2001, p.57