The World Social Forum: Charter of Prinicples

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.

1) 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.

2) 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.

3) The World Social Forum is a world process. All the meetings that are held as part of this process have an international dimension.

4) 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.

5) 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.

6) 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.

7) 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.

8) 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.

9) 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.

10) The World Social Forum is opposed to all totalitarian and reductionist 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.

11) 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.

12) As a framework for the exchange of experiences, the World Social Forum encourages understanding and mutual recognition amongst its participant organizations and movements, and places special value on the exchange among them, particularly on all that society is building to center economic activity and political action on meeting the needs of people and respecting nature, in the present and for future generations.

13) 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 de-humanization 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.

14) 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.

USEFUL Links about World Social Forums:

http://www.forumsocialmundial.org.br/

http://www.wsf2008.net/

https://www.ussf2007.org/

Northwest social forum: the challenges:

http://students.washington.edu/atoft/wordpress/

World Social Forum 2008

Why a Global day of action and mobilisation?

From the Zapatist uprising in 1995 and the Seattle demonstrations in 1999, appeared a worldwide alliance of movements against neo-liberal globalisation, war, patriarchy, racism, colonialism and environmental disasters.

In first phase, this movement focused on big international mobilisations, such as Genoa against the G8 or Cancun against the WTO. The huge demonstrations against the war on Iraq, February 15th 2003 was the apogee of this phase.

During the last years the movements grew enormously,and was rooted in national struggles and local realities. Everywhere in the world, mobilisations appeared in different fields:student movements, workers issues, poverty and violence against the women, environment and climate change, indigenous people and migrants’ rights, etc.

The main challenge for all of us, today, is to link those locals and national struggles with the worldwide goals, to give more strengths to our struggles, alternatives and campaigns,to enlarge our alliances.
That’s the purpose of the 2008 Global Day of Action: act locally to change globally! Give visibility to our local struggles through a common day of action!

Why now, and why January 26th?

The idea of a global day of action is not new. In the last years, several attempts tried to set up a day of action which could become a reference for this new “movement of movements” in analogy with May 1st for the Labour movement or March 8th for Women’s day.

Since 2001, the Wold Social Forum has become the main space in which one all those movements meet and build alliances.

The World Social Forum is not an event. It is a process,which lives in the local, national, regional and thematic Forums, in the many and plural struggles, campaigns, alternatives for another world which are developing all over the planet.

The decision to hold the next WSF event in 2009,two years after the last one in Nairobi,helped the idea of a global worldwide mobilisation to emerge.

The date of 26th of January comes from the choice to organise the Global Day of Action in the same period of the Davos summit, to maintain the confrontation with this important neo-liberal gathering of the elites and let live the spirit of WSF which always took place at the end of January.

After the Global Day of Action 2008, an evaluation will be done in order to decide if we move the date for further mobilizations and events.

Liberty Vs. Security

“Any society that would give up a little liberty to gain a little security will deserve neither and lose both.”

– Benjamin Franklin