Page 89 - Rights beautiful : collection of Professor Saneh Chamarik

Rights Beautiful Collection of Professor Saneh Chamarik

the “bureaucratic polity”, in political scientist Fred Riggs’ jargon, still very
much remains. So also the widespread problems of human rights violations.
The state of affairs then is worsening and complicated around the 70s when
the Thai economy has been further integrated into the global economic
and financial orbit of neo-liberalism, with the World Bank, IMF, and WTO
as the tools of expansionism and domination. At the behest of the so-called
Washington Consensus, Thailand has been forced to come under the
politico-economic formula for further economic globalization: liberalization,
deregulation, and privatization. Indeed, the whole Southeast Asia has been
made to fall under the same predicaments. All this makes all the human
rights problems a great deal more complex in terms of causes and effects.
What is common to all the countries in this region, in fact the whole world,
is that the issues of economic, social, and cultural rights assume a most
prominent place for all human rights defenders and advocates to work on.
As a matter of fact, they are closely inter-related to the civil and political
rights. The ones more often than not lead to the others, as amply
demonstrated in numerous cases of human rights violations in Thailand.
These concrete experiences indeed make a lot of sense the indivisibility,
inter-relatedness, and interdependence of all human rights. Any NHRC or
regional mechanism anywhere has to keep this reality in mind in carrying
out the task of human rights promotion and protection, if it is not intended
to fail in its task.
Furthermore, even the economic, social, and cultural rights themselves
assume quite a different meaning in a rural and resource-based society like
Thailand, and for that matter Southeast Asia as a whole. While in industrial
societies where economic and social rights would rely on welfare state
measures as solution, in rural and resource-based contexts, people aspire
mainly to the rights of self-reliance and self-determination. And that is
indeed true to the spirit of liberal tenet, by the way. This is what is being
meant by “community rights” as stipulated under the current “reform”
Constitution of Thailand. Surely, it also has a certain relevance elsewhere. If so,

OFFICE OF THE NATIONAL HUMAN RIGHTS COMMISSION OF THAILAND 83