This paper makes a case for extending the MDGs beyond 2015 but significantly reshaping them: to make progress towards goals more explicitly rights-based and participatory, to prioritise economic and social equity and environmental sustainability, to insist on the centrality of employment and decent work, and to move away from the outdated and oversimplified North-South dichotomy. To do this, the paper proposes using the notion of human security, both as a conceptual approach and as a framework for a policy approach that can address and redress the complex risks and vulnerabilities facing countries, communities, households and individuals, boldly and with a social justice vision. This constitutes a reinvigoration of the MDGs through the principles of the Millennium Declaration and of the Charter of the United Nations. Thus the paper argues for a deepening of the MDGs agenda, by clarifying its conceptual basis, making it more explicitly policy-oriented and adopting a bolder, rights-based policy stance. The MDGs have been a pioneering set of action-inducing targets, but without renewal now of the value-framework and updating of the policy framework, they risk degenerating into a mechanistic exercise. In earlier decades, international development debates coordinated through the United Nations system were frequently and fruitfully ambitious and „ahead of the curve‟, and this has to again become the case.