Rights Beautiful Collection of Professor Saneh Chamarik freedom, but this freedom is based on the denial of freedom to the land, forests, rivers and bio-diversity that capital claims as its own.”11 And all this is emphatically and nonchalantly defined as a matter of economic freedom and the interplay of market forces in the industrial West! Vandana Shiva, again, so appropriately brands this as the process of theft and robbery. It is not only the people’s freedom and collective rights that are endangered and lost. But most importantly it is the human right to life itself that is subject to constant threat and destruction, as everyone knows full well how all these commons are valuable and indispensable as the life support and sustenance base of local people and communities. So along the process of appropriation and privatization of the commons, the indigenous peoples and rural communities’ rights and livelihoods become thereby marginalized and impoverished, as we are all witnessing today. But then, again, that is of no serious concern, especially now that a remedy has been found by way of the so-called “social safety net” as defined by the World Bank, whereby all the expected troubles and threats to the status quo can be contained. Needless to say, this kind of pejorative idea and measure is well shared by many a distinguished economist and academe alike. Nor is that all. The colonization of nature is now reaching its new height with the all-powerful capital extending from manipulation to monopoly of life itself, through biotechnological capabilities and the accompanied intellectual property rights regime. This in itself explains the actual state of science and technology in the contemporary world. It is all practically corporate-oriented and under the same old paradigm of industrialism, something to beware of for the common people who struggle for freedom. As Andrew Kimbrell very well describes: Biotechnology extends humanity’s reach over the forces of nature as no technology in history has ever done. Bioengineers are now manipulating life forms in much the same way as the engineers 11 Vandana Shiva, “The Enclosure of the Commons”, Third World Resurgence, Issue No 84, 1997, p. 6. 36 OFFICE OF THE NATIONAL HUMAN RIGHTS COMMISSION OF THAILAND