Page 40 - Rights beautiful : collection of Professor Saneh Chamarik

Rights Beautiful Collection of Professor Saneh Chamarik

“Right…is the child of law; from real laws come real rights; from
imaginary laws, from laws of nature, fancied and invented by
poets, rhetoricians, and dealers in moral and intellectual poisons,
come imaginary rights, a bastard brood of monsters” 8
That is also why the collective economic and social rights are
seen in the West as out of bound of the human rights standards, and just
as a matter of specific concerns for humanitarians and philanthropists,
as well as social welfare. And all this, despite the UN long-established
principle of the indivisibility and interdependence of the civil and political
rights, and the economic, social and cultural rights. The reason is not hard
to find, and for a very good historical reason too. After all, the real motivating
forces behind all the past liberal revolutions were none other than the
commercial and middle classes, the haves. And to these days, all the cherished
value and tradition of liberalism are still energetically sustained by exactly
the same forces, with instinctive and adverse attitudes towards both the
state and the have-nots. It is the latter adversary that still remains the main
and exclusive target, now that the liberals have come to assume the power
of the state itself. In this context, it is of no surprise as to why it is only
and purely the civil and political liberties that count as the standard measure
of human rights. All of which should have nothing to do with the mere
“imaginary” collective economic, social and cultural rights.
In such a state of affairs, Western liberalism turns itself into the
sharp divide between the haves and the have-nots, the rich and the poor,
the ruling and the ruled, domination and freedom. Whatever angle one
looks at, they amount to practically the same predicaments. Following
the Industrial Revolution, the politics of the haves – Western styled property
rights – fast developed into a three-pronged cult of industrial capitalism

8 th th
Cited in The Economist, “The Politics of Human Rights”, August 18 -24 2001, p. 9.
See also, Onuma Yasuaki, “The Need for an Intercivilizational Approach to Evaluating
Human Rights”, and Chris Jochnick, “Human Rights for the Next Century”, Human Rights
Dialogue, Volume 10, September, 1997, pp. 4-7.

34 OFFICE OF THE NATIONAL HUMAN RIGHTS COMMISSION OF THAILAND