Page 85 - Rights beautiful : collection of Professor Saneh Chamarik

Rights Beautiful Collection of Professor Saneh Chamarik

communities too, for all their highly valuable knowledge and wisdom, are
in a dire need to learn to keep up with the time and change while sustaining
their integrity. Individual rights and liberties obviously constitute a most
vital part of this learning process. Only that it ought to be rights and liberties
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of individual or person-in-community, and certainly not the one in a
vacuum and on its absolute self as is the case today.

Institution building and networking
What has been said points to a real need for a certain rethinking
about the changing state and dimension of human rights in the globalizing
world. So along with the day-to-day functions set out by law, supposedly
the same everywhere under the Paris principles, the Thai NHRC finds
itself obliged to take into account the changing circumstances and
common people’s rising aspirations for freedom. A point has already been
made of the intended pro-active and enabling role to serve as social-
learning promoter and as part and parcel of society, not apart form it. In this
very sense, the NHRC conceives of itself as integral part of the process of
social institution building. It is not for its own sake as State agency, but for
the ultimate purpose of strengthening the Thai society and people as a whole
to develop along the common path of freedom and progress. If what is called
“human rights culture” building is to mean anything at all, this is it. It is the
question of how mutual sense of belonging is to be created between
itself and the public at large. That is why, at this formative stage, a great
deal of attention is being attached to the way the whole NHRC is to
organize itself and interrelated with society. One best conceivable way
is to have the whole operating system organized through the multi-tiered
networking.

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Herman E. Daly and John B. Cobb, Jr., ed., For the Common Good: Redirecting the Economy
toward Community, the Environment, and a Sustainable Future, Green Print, 1990,
pp. 161-165.

OFFICE OF THE NATIONAL HUMAN RIGHTS COMMISSION OF THAILAND 79