Page 14 - Rights beautiful : collection of Professor Saneh Chamarik

Rights Beautiful Collection of Professor Saneh Chamarik

marginalization and deprivation among local communities and peoples.
Unfortunately, this is not sufficiently understood, among academics and
even human rights defenders alike. For we tend to follow the norms and
standards that have already been set from afar as if ready-made formula.
That is not so in real life, I am afraid. As already mentioned, human rights
start out as moral claims of particular groups of people in particular historical
contexts. This is the crux of the whole matter. Freedom of thought and
expression is not just for the sake of exercising the rights according to the
set standards, but essentially to articulate newly-created moral claims that
might even contradict the existing ones. It would open up the new
dimensions of human rights in the world of rapid and radical change.
What recently emerges as community rights is the notable case in point.
It has now come to be recognized in the current Thai Constitution, for
example, as a result of the effective and sustainable practices of community
4
forestry in a good number of cases around the country. Naturally, it met,
and still does, with stiff obstruction both from within the government
bureaucracy, good old-time academics, and vested business interests.
And right now a draft organic law on community forestry still gets
suspended in the Parliament. At the global level, a UN Draft Declaration
on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples (DDRIP) has now been completed
5
and come up for review and endorsement. Of course, legal recognition,
national or international declaration, convention, etc., are just the beginning
and still have a long way to go, as far as human rights protection and

4
Constitution of Thailand B.E. 2540 (1997):
Article 46: “Persons so assembling as to be a traditional community shall have the
right to conserve or restore their customs, local knowledge, arts or good culture of their
community and of the nation and participate in the management, maintenance, preservation
and utilization of natural resources and the environment in a balanced and sustainable
fashion, as provided by law.”
5
Darrell A. Posey, Traditional Resource Rights: International Instruments for Protection and
Compensation for Indigenous Peoples and Local Communities, IUCN – The World
ConservationUnion, 1996, p. 28.

8 OFFICE OF THE NATIONAL HUMAN RIGHTS COMMISSION OF THAILAND