Rights Beautiful Collection of Professor Saneh Chamarik
to be imposed on the Third World countries.13 If getting through, it is not
only bio-diversity and indigenous knowledge that is in grave danger of
extinction, but also a total and absolute control on the whole life on earth.
And all, again, in the name of economic liberalism and free market.
It is also how the Western self-styled concept of human rights has
been working within the framework of individualism, property rights and
the rule of law. As Professor Edward Herman of Wharton School succinctly
and instructively puts in his opening remarks:
Doesn’t a growth process in which large numbers are immiserated
while a small elite prospers necessarily entail serious human rights
violations? In liberal theory, and in the definitions used by the major human
rights organizations of the West: No. Human rights are political and
personal rights...; they do not include economic rights to subsistence,
education, health card, housing and employment. Thus if immiseration
follows from the normal workings of the market system, based on the
economic power of private corporations and banks, and with the help of
the IMF, World Bank, US government, and a nominally democratic regime
like that of Mexico or Chile, no human rights violations are involved.14
Looking ahead
So after three full centuries, the celebrated liberalism of the West
only ends up by imposing its own specific set of human rights on the
whole world as something absolute and universal. Might thus makes right,
and unilateral “right” brings in its train arbitrary rule and social disintegration.
This is the crux of the matter. The alternative way out of this destructive end,
as Karl Polanyi suggested in his highly insightful reading into the history
of Industrial Revolution, is to turn to “the principle of social protection aiming
at the conservation of man and nature as well as productive organization,
13
Ibid., 133-137.
Edward S. Herman, “Immiseration & Human Rights”, Third World Resurgence, Issue No. 58,
June 1995, p. 41.
14
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OFFICE OF THE NATIONAL HUMAN RIGHTS COMMISSION OF THAILAND