Sorry for the wall of text, but this article exemplifies a lot of things that are wrong with contemporary Western political theory.

> Given that all governments have limited budgets, protecting one human right might prevent a government from protecting another.

That's not an excuse to dismantle human rights, only a reason to talk more about how to define and balance competing rights.

Just because it is impossible to protect every right all the time doesn't mean that the rights are not valuable. To take a familiar example, consider the CAP theorem. It is impossible to achieve consistency, availability, and partition tolerance at the same time. But that doesn't mean that we should ditch any or all of them as a goal. We just make do with as much consistency as we can achieve, as much availability as our budget allows, etc. according to our specific needs. As our hardware and software improve, we'll get even better at balancing those three, though we'll never reach perfection.

There's a tendency for philosophically minded people to try and come up with a single, internally consistent set of interpretations and set it up as eternal truth. But politics doesn't work like that. In politics as in database design, you always tinker with this and that, adapt to new material constraints, and make different compromises as you go along.

> If a government advances one group of rights, while neglecting others, how does one tell whether it complies with the treaties the best it can or cynically evades them?

Philosophically, yeah, that might be a pesky distinction. But in practice, it's often easy to tell when a government is evading its responsibilities instead of trying the damnedest to make do with what's available here and now. Because most governments in evasion mode don't even try to test the alternative.

In the early 1990s, Lee Kuan Yew, the long-time leader of Singapore, made waves in the political philosophy community by arguing against human rights. Naive philosophers took Lee's arguments at face value and tried to construct all sort of elaborate theories in an attempt to respond. After only a few years, however, it became clear that Lee was only trying to justify his own dictatorial rule.

> China cites “the right to development” to explain why the Chinese government gives priority to economic growth over political liberalisation.

Just because somebody invokes some right to justify violating some other right doesn't mean that anyone else needs to take them seriously. I'll take China seriously when they can present compelling evidence that "the right to development" is truly, fundamentally, utterly incompatible with the right to criticize the Communist Party. Until then, what they're saying is worth less than cattle manure. (See? They're not even trying.)

Trading human rights against one another is something we should do as a last resort when we really, seriously can't have both after years of trying hard. It's not something that we should accept by default.

> international human rights law does not require western countries to change their behaviour, while (in principle) it requires massive changes in the behaviour of most non-western countries

Unless you've been living under a rock, it seems that Western countries must change their behavior just as much as others do. Torture and mass surveillance in the United States! Censorship in various EU member states, oh my! No country even comes close to respecting all human rights, and the fact that some score better doesn't mean that the rules are unfair to others.

On the other hand, as a citizen and resident of a very non-Western country, I fully agree that the behavior of my country must undergo "massive changes". Seriously, fuck this authoritarian, chauvinistic, intolerant culture. If it needs to be changed beyond recognition in order for the people of this country to enjoy some human rights, by all means change it. Good riddance, I won't miss it.

> With the benefit of hindsight, we can see that the human rights treaties were not so much an act of idealism as an act of hubris...

With the benefit of hindsight, what I can see is that political theorists are too easily swayed by temporary turns of economic fortune. Do you know what finally made googly-eyed Western philosophers realize that Lee Kuan Yew's criticism of human rights was a load of bullshit? It wasn't any profound philosophical realization, it was the Asian financial crisis of 1997. As soon as the Singaporean economy crashed, nobody gave a damn about what the leader of Singapore had to say about human rights. His economy crashed, so he must be wrong, right? Duh.

Western political theorists are getting nervous these days because China is growing fast. But I wonder what all those professors would say if the Chinese economy crashed tomorrow. Likewise, Western scholars are getting nervous because most of them are good ol' progressives who don't like the U.S. meddling in the Middle East (so far so good), but somehow feel like they need to support their opinions with favorable depictions of those poor, victimized Middle Eastern communities. But wait, you don't need to glorify the victim in order to condemn the aggressor! Go to Afghanistan or Saudi Arabia and ask the women whether they like being oppressed. They're Arabs, so they can't be too hungry for Western-style human rights, right? riiiight?

The recent surge of doubt about human rights among Western scholars is, at best, little more than an extension of white guilt, and at worst, playing into the self-serving rhetoric of rich dictators in China and other developing countries. It does a disservice to the countless non-Western, non-white activists who are risking their lives this very moment to bring free speech, due process, gender equality, and other basic human rights to their own neighbors.