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