The committee of Brazilian organizations that conceived of,
and organized, the first World Social Forum, held in Porto Alegre
from January 25th to 30th, 2001, after evaluating the results of
that Forum and the expectations it raised, consider it necessary
and legitimate to draw up a Charter of Principles to guide the continued
pursuit of that initiative. While the principles contained in this
Charter - to be respected by all those who wish to take part in
the process and to organize new editions of the World Social Forum
- are a consolidation of the decisions that presided over the holding
of the Porto Alegre Forum and ensured its success, they extend the
reach of those decisions and define orientations that flow from
their logic.
The World Social Forum is an open meeting place for reflective
thinking, democratic debate of ideas, formulation of proposals,
free exchange of experiences and interlinking for effective action,
by groups and movements of civil society that are opposed to neo-liberalism
and to domination of the world by capital and any form of imperialism,
and are committed to building a planetary society directed towards
fruitful relationships among Mankind and between it and the Earth.
The World Social Forum at Porto Alegre was an event localized
in time and place. From now on, in the certainty proclaimed at
Porto Alegre that "another world is possible", it becomes
a permanent process of seeking and building alternatives, which
cannot be reduced to the events supporting it.
The World Social Forum is a world process. All the meetings
that are held as part of this process have an international dimension.
The alternatives proposed at the World Social Forum stand in
opposition to a process of globalization commanded by the large
multinational corporations and by the governments and international
institutions at the service of those corporations' interests,
with the complicity of national governments. They are designed
to ensure that globalization in solidarity will prevail as a new
stage in world history. This will respect universal human rights,
and those of all citizens - men and women - of all nations and
the environment and will rest on democratic international systems
and institutions at the service of social justice, equality and
the sovereignty of peoples.
The World Social Forum brings together and interlinks only organizations
and movements of civil society from all the countries in the world,
but intends neither to be a body representing world civil society.
The meetings of the World Social Forum do not deliberate on
behalf of the World Social Forum as a body. No-one, therefore,
will be authorized, on behalf of any of the editions of the Forum,
to express positions claiming to be those of all its participants.
The participants in the Forum shall not be called on to take decisions
as a body, whether by vote or acclamation, on declarations or
proposals for action that would commit all, or the majority, of
them and that propose to be taken as establishing positions of
the Forum as a body. It thus does not constitute a locus of power
to be disputed by the participants in its meetings, nor does it
intend to constitute the only option for interrelation and action
by the organizations and movements that participate in it.
Nonetheless, organizations or groups of organizations that participate
in the Forum's meetings must be assured the right, during such
meetings, to deliberate on declarations or actions they may decide
on, whether singly or in coordination with other participants.
The World Social Forum undertakes to circulate such decisions
widely by the means at its disposal, without directing, hierarchizing,
censuring or restricting them, but as deliberations of the organizations
or groups of organizations that made the decisions.
The World Social Forum is a plural, diversified, non-confessional,
non-governmental and non-party context that, in a decentralized
fashion, interrelates organizations and movements engaged in concrete
action at levels from the local to the international to build
another world.
The World Social Forum will always be a forum open to pluralism
and to the diversity of activities and ways of engaging of the
organizations and movements that decide to participate in it,
as well as the diversity of genders, ethnicities, cultures, generations
and physical capacities, providing they abide by this Charter
of Principles. Neither party representations nor military organizations
shall participate in the Forum. Government leaders and members
of legislatures who accept the commitments of this Charter may
be invited to participate in a personal capacity.
The World Social Forum is opposed to all totalitarian and reductionalist
views of economy, development and history and to the use of violence
as a means of social control by the State. It upholds respect
for Human Rights, the practices of real democracy, participatory
democracy, peaceful relations, in equality and solidarity, among
people, ethnicities, genders and peoples, and condemns all forms
of domination and all subjection of one person by another.
As a forum for debate, the World Social Forum is a movement
of ideas that prompts reflection, and the transparent circulation
of the results of that reflection, on the mechanisms and instruments
of domination by capital, on means and actions to resist and overcome
that domination, and on the alternatives proposed to solve the
problems of exclusion and social inequality that the process of
capitalist globalization with its racist, sexist and environmentally
destructive dimensions is creating internationally and within
countries.
As a framework for the exchange of experiences, the World Social
Forum encourages understanding and mutual recognition among its
participant organizations and movements, and places special value
on the exchange among them, particularly on all that society is
building to centre economic activity and political action on meeting
the needs of people and respecting nature, in the present and
for future generations.
As a context for interrelations, the World Social Forum seeks
to strengthen and create new national and international links
among organizations and movements of society, that - in both public
and private life - will increase the capacity for non-violent
social resistance to the process of dehumanization the world is
undergoing and to the violence used by the State, and reinforce
the humanizing measures being taken by the action of these movements
and organizations.
The World Social Forum is a process that encourages its participant
organizations and movements to situate their actions, from the
local level to the national level and seeking active participation
in international contexts, as issues of planetary citizenship,
and to introduce onto the global agenda the change-inducing practices
that they are experimenting in building a new world in solidarity.
Approved and adopted in São Paulo, on
April 9, 2001, by the organizations that make up the World Social
Forum organizing committee, approved with modifications by the World
Social Forum International Council on June 10, 2001.
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