If human rights have failed then that leaves only two main sources of authority: raw power (in the military and economic senses) and religion. Religion is just

If human rights have failed then that leaves only two main sources of authority: raw power (in the military and economic senses) and religion. Religion is just another case of authority. It's not substantively different. The raw power you speak of is the threat of violence; with religion the threatened violence just happens in the afterlife. Human Rights, on the other hand, is not an authority; it is a proposed set of limits on any form of authority. The article posits that "the central problem with human rights law is that it is hopelessly ambiguous" and this is where it goes really wrong. Making the laws more specific and binding wouldn't help. The fundamental problem is that you can't task an authority with enforcing limitations on its own power. And if you task an outside authority with enforcing those limitations, it becomes an existential threat. National sovereignty is the concept that a nation is the highest power; there is no legitimate higher power with authority over nations, therefore a nation has unlimited power over its citizens. That's fundamentally in opposition to the concept of human rights, which the article correctly recognizes, but then it attempts to put an anti-colonialist spin on the issue. Posner is talking from both sides of his mouth. I don't find that an acceptable framework to reason with when trying to decipher "good" and "bad". But that's essentially what authority is: a framework for humans to collectively decide good from bad and right from wrong. If you can't decipher them on your own and make the right decisions all by yourself, then you need some form of authority. Just don't expect to find one that limits its own power.