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