Page 11 - Rights beautiful : collection of Professor Saneh Chamarik

Rights Beautiful Collection of Professor Saneh Chamarik

of human and societal values. Unfortunately, they all are being dismissed
as out of bound of legitimate human rights in the Western world where the
property rights are being cherished above everything else. What Prof. Vitit
terms “value-added” makes a lot of sense here, not just for some specific
focus points as suggested, but also in broader perspective for the whole
task of human rights protection and promotion for the Southeast Asian
peoples who have been undergoing enormous changes forced upon them.
Now that they have gone through the historical struggles for freedom and
self-determination, a new dimension of human rights is naturally bound
to arise. All of which brings us to the substantive part of our mission while
in the process of the current dialogues and consultations on institutional
framework.
All this is of course well in line with what Prof. Vitit suggests in
the very last paragraph of his paper, i.e., “Support other activities ...e.g.
formation and networking .... More human rights education and capacity
building, and the fostering of good practices in implementing human
rights standards regionally, nationally and locally, with strong civil society
participation and people-to-people cooperation”. The point is that all these
things can very well proceed right away, pending the realization of the
planned regional mechanism. As a matter of fact, currently quite a few
of action and participatory researches have been going on and geared
to that effect. Academics and NGOs are increasingly aware of the
need to collaborate with one another for the common purpose: people’s
empowerment. All this is a promising trend. Only that it still very much
remains isolated and lacking of coordinated resources to cope with the
problems. So something badly needs to be done about it. That would help
lay a sort of infra-structural groundwork for the forthcoming institution.
In the process, human rights culture and capability would gradually be
developed. The point is that no institution can ever exist in a vacuum, or
worse still, just do for its own sake. It certainly is not the case with
human rights and dignity at stake that we have been talking about

OFFICE OF THE NATIONAL HUMAN RIGHTS COMMISSION OF THAILAND 5