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 Cited in The Economist, “The Politics of Human Rights”, August 18th-24th 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