<p>This article interrogates the semiotic and epistemic foundations of the Universalist human rights project. Contemporary human rights discourse presents itself as a framework of universal recognition, yet it frequently operates as a normative imposition, producing a singular legal meaning of ‘the human’ that effaces ontological and cultural difference. From a Yoruba feminist perspective, this article argues that the universal human subject is a provincial legal sign rooted in colonial modernity individualistic, secular, and gender dimorphic. Engaging the field of Epistemologies of the South, it advances a decolonial semiotics of law through a philosophical legal analysis of Yoruba indigenous concepts of personhood and normativity. Centring the concept of Enìyàn (person/humanity), the article demonstrates that Yoruba legal ethical thought encodes subjectivity through relationality, cosmic duty, and communal accountability, rather than individual entitlement. In this normative order, rights do not signify possessions held against the state; they operate as relational signifiers embedded within a social and spiritual web. Drawing on Oyèrónkẹ́ Oyěwùmí’s critique of Western gender categories while engaging seriously with scholarly challenges to her thesis, the article further shows that the colonial imposition of gender dimorphism constitutes a re signification of social relations that disrupts indigenous systems of recognition and the matriarchal authority of Ìyá. The article ultimately argues for cognitive justice: not as the inclusion of African voices within existing frameworks, but as a pluriversal reconstruction of legal meaning. Through diatopical hermeneutics, Yoruba feminist epistemologies are mobilised to unsettle abstract universalism and advance a decolonial human rights praxis grounded in epistemic plurality.</p>