“The West, over the duration of its global hegemony, would prove itself brilliantly adept at exploiting this realisation. Repeatedly, Christian concepts were re-packaged for non-Christian audiences. Today, as in the 18th century, a doctrine such as that of human rights is far likelier to be signed up to if its origins among the canon lawyers of medieval Europe is kept scrupulously concealed. The emphasis placed by United Nations agencies on “the antiquity and broad acceptance of the conception of the rights of man” was a necessary precondition for their claim to a global, rather than a merely Western, jurisdiction.”