The international human rights movement is undergoing an internal reckoning. The legitimacy of the human rights project is being questioned within the movement. These internal critiques render more visible and contestable the influence of human rights movement actors in the Global North over the international human rights agenda. Yet these critiques are incomplete. Grounded in decades of experience as an international human rights practitioner, this article uses the concept of the international human rights imaginary to explain why and how the technologies of traditional international human rights practice (practice forms) embed colonizing tendencies to supplant local knowledge and priorities. It argues that the harms of practice forms can be mitigated if international practitioners incorporate a principle of solidarity with local human rights struggles.The common understandings of what human rights are and how they should be defended are advanced by international nongovernmental organizations based in western Europe and the United States with access to international decision makers, institutions, and funding. These are the actors who exercise power to set the priorities for the international human rights movement. The human rights practice forms commonly used by dominant NGOs are integral to the political economy of the international human rights movement. These dynamics are illustrated through the three quintessential practices of statement advocacy, human rights reporting, and standard setting advocacy. Their study exposes how the imaginary operates in practice. North-based human rights actors need to reimagine human rights to be relevant to a multi-polar, pluralistic, and global—rather than to a merely North-based, western, and international—human rights movement.