Page 68 - Rights beautiful : collection of Professor Saneh Chamarik

Rights Beautiful Collection of Professor Saneh Chamarik

the liberal West itself, all this is no simple matter. There is real and urgent
need to do a rethinking, that is to say, far beyond a mere dealing with the
rd
specific cases at hand. As stressed in the 3 ASEAN Workshop, May 2003,
we need to clarify our own position as to who we are as the people and in
what direction to go.
From the ASEAN dialogue and the Thai NHRC’s own experiences,
there are at least three considerations that need to be taken care of in the
process of carrying out our mission for the promotion and protection of
human rights. First and foremost is the task of common people’s capacity
building. Here human rights education has a most vital role to play. This is
not just the matter of formal one in schools or universities, though. It needs
to be carried through the investigating process right on the spot where
the incidents of human rights violation take place. The point is to draw
upon the participation of all the parties concerned with a view to promoting
social learning and training in real life. Then relevant research could be taken
up in a systematic way to have disseminated all such concrete experiences
to the public at large. All these case studies could indeed very well be fed
back into the curricula of those educational institutions concerned. In sum,
to make human rights a truly objective and relevant as social learning,
both in and out of school, with civil society participation and people-to-people
cooperation.
Secondly, is a holistic view to be taken with fellow human beings
in question as the centre of attention, not on the basis of which and which
category of human rights they belong to in the reductionist fashion of
current international standard and practice. For, again, in real life especially
in the non-western world, both the CPRs and ESCRs are closely inter-related
and interdependent in the incidence of infringements on human right and
human dignity. Indeed, more often than not, they form a unifying whole. In
Thailand, we have been witnessing cases of ESCRs violation spilling over
into CPRs problems. The legitimate public protests against the gas pipelines
project in the South is one such good example that soon gives rise to

62 OFFICE OF THE NATIONAL HUMAN RIGHTS COMMISSION OF THAILAND