Employing postcolonial critical international relations theory as its theoretical bedrock, this article uses the U.N.-U.S.-French-led humanitarian intervention in Haiti in 2004 to examine top-tier states' claims to universal human rights and bottom-tier states' claims to sovereign national democratic rights. This article critically interrogates both the theoretical and policy assumptions of an emergent interventionism by the North into the South, and examines Haitian social forces and their pan-African allies (CARICOM, the AU, and CBC), who are opposed to the universalist appropriation and imposition of a rights domain that curtails freedom in the international arena.