The construction of the constitutional essentials of democratic politics by the European Court of Human Rights following Sejdić and Finci ° Steven Wheatley * In his contribution to this collection, David Kennedy observes that the concept of human rights is no longer just an idea: both as a discourse and in formal institutional settings, ‘human rights’ are relied upon to denounce the conduct of states and promote global justice. Human rights activists, professionals and lawyers should accept the responsibilities of rulership and re‐imagine the idea of human freedom in more expansive terms – freedom from hunger, disease and war, etc. – to remake world society by establishing a new system of rulership with a greater potential for the emancipation of human persons. 1 The analysis is compelling in highlighting the ways in which the idea of ‘human rights’ constrains the ways in which we understand justice in world society, and the limits of that understanding. What is self‐consciously absent is any requirement to legitimate the rulership of a new humanitarian elite by reference to standards of normative political or ° Steven Wheatley, ‘The construction of democratic politics following Sejdić and Finci’ in Elena Katselli, et al. Examining Critical Perspectives on Human Rights (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press: forthcoming 2011). * Professor of International Law, University of Leeds. 1 David Kennedy, ‘The International Human Rights Regime: Still Part of the Problem?’ (this volume). Elsewhere, Professor Kennedy observes ‘the exuberance of humanitarians who see a constitutional moment of the first order… in the emergence of human rights… as a global vocabulary of legitimacy’: David Kennedy, The dark side of virtue: reassessing international humanitarianism (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2004), p. 336.