Page 39 - Rights beautiful : collection of Professor Saneh Chamarik

Rights Beautiful Collection of Professor Saneh Chamarik

is a good example. In spite of currently constitutional provisions for
community rights with regard to indigenous knowledge and bio-diversity,
the very issues under discussion in this forum, all these moral claims
are still far from being realized in practice. This is because a mere legal or
moral formula cannot just exist on its own without social and cultural
backup. This is certainly not a matter of disappointment or outright
despair. That would unfortunately be too light-hearted and superficial. It all
is the nature of things, that is, the beginning of a social process just like
any strenuous process of struggles for freedom in human history. The crucial
difference is that indigenous peoples and rural communities nowadays do
not just stand alone in all this. A meaningful and substantive beginning
has already been made with at least a sector of world public opinions
and people’s movements behind it, even though still very much in face to
face with the power that be.

Retrogressive and authoritarian global politics
of human rights
There are two major and interrelated factors that stand in the way
of development towards human freedom and progress: one conventional
and another a new market totalitarianism. The first has something to do
with the good old definition of human rights itself. It is of course the
historical West that did inspire the whole world with the modern ideas of
human rights and dignity. And yet it only falls back on and confines itself
to those created in “particular historical, social, and economic circumstances”
of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. That is why the meaning and
scope of human rights is narrowly defined as those strictly concerned
with individual liberties, property rights, and the rule of law. In short, just
those with judiciable qualifications. In Jeremy Bentham’s classic polemic
against the French Revolution’s Declaration of the Rights of Man and of
the Citizens expounding the natural and inalienable rights of all people:

OFFICE OF THE NATIONAL HUMAN RIGHTS COMMISSION OF THAILAND 33