The ideas and practices of human rights and development which were institutionalised in the twentieth century (in the UN, World Bank, and the IMF) started to take shape after 1492 with the ontological construction of Man and the human which took place in the context of the debates on the rights of people in the sixteenth century. The premise of such discussions was the idea of progress in conjunction with the notion of race, where colour determined rational capacity which again determined a person’s stage in the modern/colonial imaginary line of progress/development, which again underscored the extent to which people could be regarded as human. The idea of progress continued to constitute an effort to manage and consolidate colonialism and the exploitation of nature without losing a moral justification for it. In the eighteenth century, de Vitoria’s ideas on the rights of people were reformulated into a secular document on the rights of men and citizens, and were primarily characterised by the negation of colonialism and coloniality. I contend that human rights and development cannot be understood satisfactorily if studied separately because they continue to evolve in a symbiotic relationship whose most important characteristic is the negation of coloniality and, by implication, of the possibility of worlds and knowledge otherwise. Furthermore, I explore the paradox inherent in this argument; that while the ideas on human rights negate colonialism and coloniality, the ideas of progress and development provide the moral and scientific justification of colonialism and coloniality.