Porto Alegre, April 9, 2001 · Adopted by the WSF International Council
The committee of Brazilian entities that conceived of, and organized, the first World Social Forum, held in Porto Alegre from January 25th to 30th 2001, considered it necessary and legitimate to draw up a Charter of Principles to guide the pursuit of that initiative.
The Principles in the 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, consolidate the decisions that presided over the Porto Alegre Forum and ensured its success.
The World Social Forum is an open meeting space for deepening reflection, 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 neoliberalism 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 Humankind 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 capitalist globalization commanded by the large multinational corporations and by the governments and international institutions at the service of those corporations' interests. They are designed to ensure that globalization in solidarity will prevail as a new stage in world history.
The World Social Forum brings together and interlinks only organizations and movements of civil society from all the countries in the world, but it does not intend 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.
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. The World Social Forum undertakes to circulate such decisions widely by the means at its disposal.
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.
The World Social Forum is opposed to all totalitarian and reductionist views of economy, development and history and to the use by governments of the force of arms as a means of social control. It upholds respect for Human Rights, the practices of true democracy, participatory democracy, peaceful relations, in equality and solidarity.
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.
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 centre economic activity and political action on meeting the needs of people.
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 will increase the capacity for non-violent social resistance to the process of dehumanization the world is undergoing.
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.
